The Technological System

Jacques Ellul 1980 The Continuum Publishing Corporation 815 Second Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10017

The Technological System Translated from the French by Joachim Neugroschel

Originally published as Le Sytème technicien by Calmann-Lévy Copyright Calmann-Lévy 1977 English translation copyright © 1980 by The Continuum Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of The Continuum Publishing Corporation. Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Ellul, Jacques. The technological system. Translation of Le système technicien. Bibliography. 1. Technology and civilization. 1. Title. HM221.E4313

303.4'83

ISBN 0-8264-9007-4

80-15344

CONTENTS

Introduction

Introduction

1

Part One: WHAT IS TECHNOLOGY

21

1

Technology As a Concept 2 Technology As an Environment 3 Technology As a Determining Factor 4 Technology As a System General Idea Defining the System Features of the System The Absence of Feedback Part Two: THE PHENOMENON

CHARACTERISTICS

23 34 51 76 76 82 108 117 OF

THE

TECHNOLOGICAL 123

5 Autonomy 6 Unity 7 Universality 8 Totalization

125 156 169 199

Part Three: THE CHARACTERISTICS OF TECHNOLOGICAL PROGRESS

205

9 10 11 13

209 232 256 283

Self-Augmentation Automatism Causal Progression and Absence of Finality The Problem of Acceleration

Conclusion: Man in the Technological System Postscript Notes Bibliography

310 326 327 361

TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY TECHNOLOGY is not content with being, or in our world, with being the principal or determining factor. Technology has become a system. This is what I will try to show in this analysis. But we have to be clear about the object of my research. Twenty-five years ago, I arrived at the notion of the "technological society"; but now, that stage is passed. Nevertheless, we are faced with the major problem of what makes up the specific nature of our society, its chief characteristic. Indeed, we have to track down the key to interpreting the modern age. But if we go through the field of definitions that are generally accepted today, we will see that every so-called specific trait is actually secondary and points ultimately to technology. Let us investigate.1 The best-known definition today is by Raymond Aron: the "industrial society.” This term is very widespread, but I find it inadequate. Let us ignore the knotty question whether Raymond Aron is designating a model or the reality of our society. For a model, an ideal type, his description is rigorously exact, useful, and interesting. But it obviously does not correspond to present-day reality. In the nineteenth century, Western society was certainly an industrial one, and Aron is right in showing that once the industrial factor began to develop, it affected all societal relations. He is right in showing that the industrial factor led to a social model that was similar everywhere, no matter what the national traits, the political system, or the original differences. Now the industrial factor is characterized by the multiplication of machines and a certain organization of production. Both factors are technological. Today, however, the industrial factor may still be huge, but it does not have much in common with what it was in the nineteenth century.

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Above all, it is drowned in a mass of other phenomena that are equally important. Although these phenomena are partially determined by the industrial factor, they have broken away from it, taking on a tremendous volume and a force of transformation which goes beyond industry in the strict sense of the word. Present-day society is still industrial; but that is not its essence.2 We need not dwell too long on this contrast between the industrial system and the technological system. Let us focus on two examples of analysis: Seurat's and Richta's. The influence of technological systematics contrasting the industrial world with the new conception was very well analyzed by Georges Seurat, Réalités du transfert technologigue (1976). And his example is highly significant: What is the difference between the old factory and the new? In the former, the goal is to add value to raw material in a series of operations performed by a family of machines, each machine having its own function. If a problem crops up in one "family," it has no repercussions on any other. The machines are installed in partitioned workshops; the families of machines are kept independent of one another by stocks and interconnections. Human error has little weight. Seurat compares the structure of that factory to a beehive or anthill: an individual's mistake is unimportant. The past fifty years have completed a metamorphosis in four ways: The power of unitary machines has been growing incessantly. A new machine costs less to buy, produce, and run than two old machines, but its output is twice that of one old machine. "Along the path of giantism, one can reasonably go to the limits of the possible, concentrating businesses in order to put them on the scale of the biggest machines imaginable.” This assertion by a distinguished expert on technology rightly sweeps away the ideological conjectures about smaller sizes of companies, the dispersal of small factories in nature, etc. Such consoling ideologies came from Maoist ideas or from the unwarranted assumption that everything would shrink because certain devices are now so tiny. In the industrial reality, all we can expect is a theoretically indefinite growth of subsystems. The second line of development emphasized by Seurat is complexification: "The problems raised by giantism require solutions that are often at the frontier of the universe explored by technology.” However, this complexification includes an apparent simplification. The giant and complex machines can no longer be trivialized within a family of machines. The hookups are too

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burdensome or too fragile. An ideal structure is imposed: One single machine performs each stage of the process, and there has to be a continuous flow of raw material along the production line of the machines. Hence: no more separate workshops, no more stocks, no more interconnections. As a result, the earlier analogy to the anthill is passé, "the ants have disappeared.” (Which shows how simply backward China actually is.) A factory now creates a vertical integration of successive machines, each having a different function. There is a "body"–enormous and complex, but it is one body. This in turn necessitates a greater circulation of information. And that is the fourth characteristic: Information has to be automated and decentralized. Otherwise, nothing can function. Hence, the inevitable presence of the computer. Information circuits innervate the entire process at each stage, and all of them frequently wind up in a single control room. In biological terms, this structure could be likened to a cerebralization. We must bear in mind, however, that this is nothing but a simile and that this gigantic structure is not alive in any way. The whole thing cannot function without a human being who is properly trained, aware of his responsibility, capable of attention and solidarity, and proof against sabotage or striking. The damage done to all would be too immense. Still, the most rigorous demonstration of the passage from industrial to technological society, of the radical difference between the two, is furnished by Radovan Richta's fundamental opus Civilisation at the Crossroads (1969). Richta even sees that difference as the key to interpreting the failure of socialism in the USSR. He maintains that the Soviets are clinging to the industrial model, unwilling to take the step that would bring them into the technological system. A system totally different from the earlier one. At one time, technology and machine industry were connected; but for more than half a century now, a gap has widened between them. Industrialism developed a centralized, hierarchical system, with a linear growth, a division of labor, and a separation between the means and the ends. Mechanization created additional jobs and made human work more draining. It operated by means of steady reproduction, developing masses of men and integrating them in the industrialization. Modern technology, however, contradicts each of those different points. If allowed to act, it leads to decentralization and flexibility; it does away with the hierarchy and the division of labor; it particularly has to bridge the gap between implementation and

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management; it presupposes a polyvalent and nonlinear growth; it reintegrates the ends into the means; it cuts down on labor and thus on the costs of labor. The value factor is no longer human work but scientific invention and technological innovation. Consequently, we can no longer apply Marx's analysis, which states that the economic totality is based on the surplus value produced by the salaried labor of the worker. The industrial system is a closed, repetitive world, with a linear evolution. The technological system is inevitably open, nonrepetitive, with a polyvalent evolution. It can proceed only by the universal development of mankind, and that development is absolutely necessary for the development of the technological system. We are thus confronted with an ensemble that is totally different from any that has ever existed before. Technology may not yet be playing that role, but Richta has an explanation with which I agree by and large. He points out that neither capitalist nor socialist countries are managing to leave the industrial model of society. They jealously preserve industrialism and industrial production as dominant features, both economically and sociologically. Moreover, they force technology to serve this development, which goes against the very grain of modern technology. Hence, technology is all the more alienating, but only because of that fact. For technology, conceived in terms of its automation, its chemical transformation of the world, its economy of energy, its cybernation, its data processing, its biological intervention, and its indefinite output of nuclear energy, has little to do with the old industrial mechanization. We are dealing here with a tremendous idea, with a decisive importance. However, rather than coming back to Richta later on, I would like to offer some criticism of his work-and his team–right away. First of all, I think, they completely failed to see that they were dealing with a system, and they failed to envisage the consequences of that. They were dominated by a humanism that is very appealing and very refreshing, but perhaps a bit sentimental and not too rigorous. They overemphasized the automative aspect of technology, as if that were a key to everything else. Finally, they displayed a vast idealism in regarding technology as something positive, so long as it is viewed on its own terms (not deformed) and is left alone. Hence, they believe, it is valid to apply pedagogical techniques toward an utterly new didactics for shaping a certain type of man. "The aim of education is not to form a certain type of man, but a man capable of forming himself according to such and

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such a type and to change that type. . . . Teaching should be oriented towards the structure of the object and be based . . . on generalizing the creative faculties." We fully agree about the desirable goals. But according to these lines–and I could quote a hundred examples–Richta assumes that what is desirable from a humanist viewpoint has been virtually realized by technology. Such is his idealism, preventing him from bringing up the issue of power. He never once stops to think that technology is power, made up of instruments of power, hence producing phenomena and structures of power, i.e., of domination. For Richta, technology spells an enrichment of the human person and the mutual development of man by man. Yet we do not see how humanity is to pass from the control of man by others (and not by himself) to the situation that Richta visualizes–a situation of giving and loving. Technology does not make that possible. On the contrary! Those are my chief criticisms. However, they do not detract from the depth of the analysis or the validity of the total orientation. What is needed is not so much a more precise knowledge of the system, but rather a way of relating it to mankind and the overall society and of examining the fundamental choices that must now be made. Certain sociologists fully realize that we are no longer in an industrial society, for instance, Daniel Bell, and then also Alain Touraine. But they employ strange words: postindustrial, or advanced industrial society. I find it quite remarkable that a time when the use of mathematics is being developed in the human sciences, people can employ such imprecise and meaningless words. Bell pinpoints the five dimensions of postindustrial society as follows: (1) The creation of an economy of services. (2) The predominance of the class of specialists and technicians. (3) The importance of the theoretical service as a source of innovation and political elaboration in the society. (4) The possibility of autonomous technological growth. (5) The creation of a new intellectual technology. But how can one fail to see that these five traits are directly linked to the growth and predominance of technology and technicians? The very terms used by Bell imply as much. Furthermore, there is no reason why they would describe a "post" society. Postindustrial? This simply means that we have passed the industrial stage. And now?

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In what way does this indicate the slightest feature, render the slightest idea of what our society is like? If someone knew nothing about these things, one could precisely define the machine, industry, hence industrial society. But how can we communicate anything about a "post"?3 Would Bell ever dream of defining the political society of the seventeenth century as postfeudal, or that of the nineteenth century as postmonarchic? Likewise, the term “'advanced or developed industrial society" makes no sense. "Developed"? This can only mean that industry has developed further. So we must still be living in a society that is industrial, only more so. Historical experience shows that the essential trend of industry is to develop. Hence, we can restrict ourselves to saying "a truly industrial industrial society.” "Advanced"? But toward what? What has advanced? Where have we gotten to in this progression? What new trait has emerged? We are told nothing about all that. Consequently, those adjectives are perfectly useless, describe nothing in our society, and should therefore be resolutely discarded. It must be emphasized that Touraine,4 in contrast to Bell, hesitates about a qualifying term. Thus, he speaks of a "programmed society.” In this case, I am far more in agreement. For he thereby joins the overall outlook of those people for whom the new thing about our society is the organization. He sharply distinguishes between the primary (capitalist) era of industrialization and our era. He qualifies this new society in terms of three features: (1) The emergence of new social "classes" (technicians, bureaucrats, efficiency experts). (2) The new trend of business, which is now based on organization and no longer on the relationship between economic power and productive labor. (3) Spare-time activities. All three characteristics boil down to a reduction and to the necessities of the technological system, which, as Touraine realizes, transforms the social struggles themselves. They are becoming more technological and are no longer subject to a takeover by the proletariat. Touraine adds one more essential feature of postindustrial society: the importance of the student movement with its deep contestation, its challenge, and its political weakness. But, as I have tried to show in my studies on revolution, I regard this feature as episodic and contingent. I feel that Touraine was influenced by the current events while writing his book. There is another theme that is often developed under the label "bureaucratic society.” Obviously, this is a major trait, shedding light on the form of power. It points out a development and it affects

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the entire social body. Let us leave aside the facile critique of bureaucracy. The things to be stressed are: the principles of order, method, neutrality, organization, and efficiency. Administration becomes bureaucracy in the positive sense of the term when: the best possible people are hired; the social integration is complete; and the operation is active and efficient. Bureaucracy employs more and more complex machines and must itself function like a machine. The ideal administration is one that runs and works like an engine, with each office as a component and each individual as a part. The functioning has to be regular and continuous, beyond any opinions or influences. Some observers therefore apply the phrase "organization society" to the society marked by such an administration. Undoubtedly, the term shows that the essence of bureaucracy is organization, and that this bureaucracy not only is governmental but also occurs in all forms of societal activity. Actually, though, the two terms overlap somewhat. However, one is narrower and pejorative. The other is broader and positive. In reality, though, all the marks and qualities of bureaucratic society come from the technologies of organization. The thing that has transformed administration into bureaucracy is the technology of efficiency. Bureaucracy depends on those technologies. Furthermore, it is obvious that this definition does not take into account all the aspects, all the reality of our society. Organization and bureaucracy are indeed essential. But so are what they organize and administer! We cannot cut our society down to that single characteristic, distinguishing it from all other societies and covering all its activities. There is a term that stems immediately from the above, with the term adopted by a certain number of economists (after C. Clark and J. Fourastié): a "society of services" or a "tertiary society." I will make the same comments here as before. If we have passed into a society of services, then the reasons are as follows. The productive technologies allowing the growth of industrial society were followed by technologies of organization, administration, leisure, etc., allowing the growth of services. Indeed, if one wishes to describe these three "orders," one refers to a certain number of technologies used in each of them. On the other hand, the notion of service, which validly designates the third aspect of economic activity, does not envelop all forms of this society. It does not take into account the complexity of life today, and it does not include what may be the most important aspect.

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Plainly, we now have to deal with the shibboleth that was all the rage in 1968: the "consumer society.” This slogan is useful for agitation and propaganda. To its credit, it accentuated an overly neglected aspect, and it focused the definition on the individual's life. But quite obviously, our society is characterized at least as much by work and production as by consumption! This is not the key word that covers everything, explains everything! If this term is aimed at the ideology inhabiting all of us, it is valid. If it is aimed at the economic or social reality, it is highly inadequate. However, there is one thing that strikes me as important: in consumption, we again find the technological element as the decisive one. What triggers consumption? Advertising, that is to say, the technologies of advertising. What is it that demands greater consumption? Mass production, which is possible only because of technology. What are we given to consume? Technological objects, because they are the things that are produced most. Hence, the consumer society, in all its aspects, is primarily characterized by various technologies.5 Close to the "consumer society," we find the famous "affluent society.” Just how did we get to it, supposedly? By the development of certain technological factors, particularly automation. We must not forget, however, that this affluence is an affluence of technological products. And it is counterbalanced by the creation of new "shortages": of space, air, time, and the like. These shortages are all due to the application of technologies that are crucial to the existence of the affluent society. We will come back to this. Now affluence is certainly one of the important signs of the new society. But, in turn, it is dependent on and qualified by a certain number of technologies. Next comes an attempt at synthesizing the above factors when H. Lefebvre offers his definition: a "bureaucratic society of planned consumption.” Actually, this denotes three of the characteristics following the industrial stage and perfectly consistent with certain functions and structures in our society. But this formula also reveals the same flaws as the earlier ones. It covers only certain aspects of our society: organization, consumption, psychological action. And it sacrifices others that are equally important: for instance, massification, production. Lefebvre's formula remains on a shallow level. He omits the factor common to all the included elements and constituting both their reason and their mode. Hence, his definition is no more scientific than the others, contrary to what he may claim. All he really offers is an addition of three characteristics rather than the results of a fundamental analysis.

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Nevertheless, Lefebvre's formula directs us to a whole series of definitions that focus on a different category of phenomena: information. We can look at two of those definitions here. One is by Marshal MacLuhan. For MacLuhan, the decisive fact is the appearance of new mass media, which transform not only the social fabric but, even more so, the way each individual thinks and lives. This is caused not so much by the sheer multiplication of information, but rather by the way this information is conveyed. Instead of delving into the countless aspects discussed by MacLuhan, we shall dwell on two elements. First of all, we have to point out the same thing as before. The new media are essentially and primarily technological media. They are produced by technological progress, they accompany it, they are closely tied to it, and they derive from each technological modification. It is not the media that bring forth technology, but rather the reverse. Furthermore, seductive as MacLuhan's theses may be, he obviously exaggerates the influence of the media by making them the sole explanation for everything happening in our society. His intellectual acrobatics are ingenious and admirable, but they fail to convince because they do not refer to any verifiable reality. The multiplying of media and information is certainly decisive today, but that single element cannot serve to describe everything. And even if we accept the modern analyses of language, we are left with the fact that technology is still the infrastructure, and permitting that multiplication in the first place. Along the same lines, the situationists speak of a "society of spectacle.” Because of bourgeois ideology, the watering-down of all serious things, the break in praxis, the multiplication of communications, the psychological action, everything in our society has become a spectacle. This term must not be taken in a simple and trivial sense; it has to be given its necessary breadth. Spectacle is a complete way of life. Consumption is a spectacle; so are political activity and leisure and work and family life and revolution. Modern man watches everything as a spectator. Everything is supplied to him as a spectacle, including the things he believes he is most deeply contributing to or participating in. This analysis is assuredly the most profound. It is not fragmentary, and it may be praised for its coherent picture of observations concerning the individual and the social body. The individual is looked at as being within the social body. But how can this analysis fail to see that if there is a society of spectacle, then it exists because of, thanks to, and with a view to the technological transformation of

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our society! Technological methods are what make spectacle allinclusive. Technological activity is "by nature" spectacular (excluding all internal reality): Technological activity is what waters down all serious things, since no action can be performed any longer unless by way of technologies. And the society of spectacle seems to be the ideal framework, the most favorable environment for developing technology because it is the milieu that is least disturbed by any untimely interference from autonomous man. Hence, technology is still the key to this presentday reality. Z. Brzezinski (Between Two Ages: America's Role in the Technetronic Era, 1970) also figured he could add something absolutely new by coining the term "technetronic.” He lists a number of differences between industrial and technetronic society. In industrial society, the machine plays the essential role. The dominant social problems are unemployment and employment. Teaching is done through human relations. The ruling class is plutocratic. The university is an ivory tower isolated from reality. Reading favors a conceptual thinking proper to ideologies. Political conflicts are intrinsic; the masses are organized into trade unions; economic power is personalized; wealth is the object of activity. The technetronic society may be contrasted to the above, point by point. There is a growth of "services." Automation replaces industrial employment. The central issue is that of qualifications. People give in to job security. Teaching is universal because of the communications technologies. Knowledge replaces wealth as a means of action. The university becomes the "reservoir of thinking," plunged into concrete life. The problem of participation in decision-making is generalized; it goes beyond political matters. Ideologies vanish, economic power is depersonalized, and wealth is no longer useful. I certainly won't deny that Brzezinski has very accurately brought out new features of society in its present or imminent phase, but I don't see the need for coining a new term. "Technetronic" is a portmanteau word combining "technical" and "electronic.” Come now! Isn't electronics technological? Does the word add anything to the early definitions of technology? Once again, technology equals the machine plus industry. Fine, then there is something new–according to the famous definition: In a machine, there are material parts that move. Electronics operates with no moving material parts. Granted. But if the computer is not a machine in the normal sense, then in what way is it not the product of a certain number of technologies? In what way is it not integrated

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in a technological system? There is no reason to distinguish between technology and electronics. The latter is merely part of the former. The traits that Brzezinski discerns in his technetronic society are actually the traits of a technological society. And much as I like his honest book, I am forced to admit that he simply went along with the fad of making up aseemingly-soteric vocabulary in order to give the impression of coming up with something new. What he says (in the first two sections of his book) is quite standard in regard to technological society. And all that is new here is the word "technetronic," which is unjustified. "Technology" amply suffices for everything he discusses. *** In thus reviewing the most important current definitions of our society, we have been led to conclude in each case that the decisive fact, explaining the feature brought out, is the phenomenon of technology, and that this factor is common to all the definitions proposed.6 Now each of these definitions is accurate. We cannot say that any of the authors is wrong, for each has detected an essential aspect of our time. We cannot say that any of the definitions is flatly better than another. But each is limited. Generalizing is made possible by considering the common factor. This factor pays heed to all the aspects, and, since each one is accurate, the common factor must be accurate too. However, it exists at a deeper, more decisive level of analysis. Still, we need not wander off into philosophical abstraction since the relationship between that factor and the various traits is an actual and immediately verifiable relationship. Moreover, starting with the common factor, we could unearth other, equally important traits of our society.7 This will become evident as we go along. However, by focusing on those that are commonly agreed on, we come to an unexpected result. We will be examining the "technological system," but we can say right now that these characteristics are intrinsic to the technological system itself. In other words, each author has tried, albeit unwittingly, to define our society through the technological system. Each time, light was shed on some element of the technological system. The latter functions in a nonstop circulation of "production and consumption.” Nonetheless, these terms must be taken on all levels, for there is production not only of industrial goods, but also of symbols, individuals (by education), spare-time activities, ideologies, service signs, information. What is known as circulation

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(including that of human beings or information) always originates in production and winds up in consumption. However, this complex system is made possible only by improving an organization that leads to a more and more complete overlapping of production and consumption. Advancing constantly and necessarily, technology makes the technological system the agent of an inevitable affluent society. But, conversely, with everything thus being produced and consumed, the system presupposes a more and more thorough integration of each element, including man, as an object. Man can no longer be a subject. For, the system implies that, at least in regard to itself, man must always be treated as an object. Today, this phenomenon is far more important than the renowned Marxist interpretation of "commodity.” The latter was defined by the capitalist system. But now, the capitalist system has been swallowed up by the technological system. And the category of commodity–still partly accurate and to be used with caution–does not explain very much. The category of the technicized object is far more crucial and-now-more rigorous. The technological system performs unintentionally. Hence, wherever it is applied, it produces a new kind of objectification which has nothing to do with Hegel's: it is no longer an objectification of the subject, and does not enter a subject-object dialectics. Now, anything that is incorporated, or seized, is treated as an object by the active system, which cannot develop or perform without acting upon a set of elements that have previously been rendered neutral and passive. Nothing can have an intrinsic sense; it is given meaning only by technological application. Nothing can lay claim to action; it is acted upon by technological process. Nothing can regard itself as autonomous; it is the technological system that is autonomous–as we shall demonstrate. Thus we can see that the famous theme of man's " reification" (now tending to replace "alienation") has its place and its explanation in an analysis of the technological system. We will come back to this. The preeminence and all-inclusiveness of the system allow us to describe modern society as the "technological society.” This term, société technicienne, was first used in France by Georges Friedmann in 1938.8 I would, however, like to add the word technicized (technicisé). The first adjective, technological (technicien), refers to the active character of the technological agent (agent technicien) and the second adjective to the resulting effect on society. Nevertheless, this definition has been criticized by scholars like H. Lefebvre.9 We can focus on three of his objections.

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The first: Technology does not exist. It is important and effective only because of the urban milieu; outside that milieu, technology produces only isolated objects. This criticism neglects the correlation between the "isolated objects," the creation of a complete technological system. The city is obviously the best framework for technology to develop in. But, as we have said, this framework is itself produced by technology, which also extends outside the city: the world of farming is becoming more and more technicized. The second: Technology is becoming an autonomous and determining social object. This can take place only through a social stratum, which tends to become a caste or class: the technocrats, who act by way of organization. Hence, one must speak of a technocratic and bureaucratic society. And off we march to wage war against the technocracy. I would say that this passage is a bit superficial! Technology operates only through a class? This remark overlooks the fact that each individual participates in the technological system on all levels. To neglect such a fact, one has to insist on the categories of Marxist interpretation of class and of the force acting through a class. One has to start by ignoring the dissolution of classes, as caused by the growth of the technological system. But even more than that, the claim of a transition from "technician to technocrat" is perfectly unacceptable. I do not see a real technocrat anywhere, as I have often written. And for me, the society of technicians is ultimately quite antitechnocratic. For no technician claims to be ruling society. There is no need to regard technicians as technocrats or to believe that a class of that type actually exists. Those two criticisms are based on a very shallow and hasty view of the technological reality. The best response to Lefebvre's mythic view of the technocracy was offered by F. Hetman (L'Europe de l'abondance 1967). In his book, there is an intelligent analysis of the effects of technology (as bringing affluence) on the social structures. Hetman very lucidly shows three effects, which dovetail with the sociological makeup of a technological society. Colin Clark's classification is replaced by a different one: at the bottom, the "unqualified afunctionals"; then the "functional operators"; and at the top, the "rulers-researchers-conceivers"; with perhaps a fourth sector for the activities of operational research. In other words, the social distribution is (already) less and less in terms of activities applied to the economy, and more and more in keeping with the technological capacity. As a

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result, we are entering–so we are told–the "era of clerks," and these clerks are the decision-makers in all domains because they have the knowledge and use of the technologies. Like it or not (and Hetman shows this so well), the experts, the specialists of diverse technologies are to be found everywhere, from business to administration, from government to agriculture. They form the true grid of society, the network holding the various pieces together. It is the technological coherence that now makes up the social coherence. But this is not a technocracy in the true sense of the word. Finally, Lefebvre's last criticism: The theory of the technological society is really an illusion, a myth justifying the situation.10 Its aim is to justify the privileged positions, divert the revolutionary forces, and disguise the unbearable aspects of the society. In other words, that theory plays the role of "ideology" in Marxist doctrine. I admit that I do not quite understand how a concrete analysis leading to a certain interpretation can be described in those terms. (Unless one starts out from another ideology, Marxism. This ideology turns the categories of class, exploitation, proletariat, commodity, etc., into definitive and scientific categories. Hence, it cannot understand anything outside its system, and it then attacks whatever it cannot fit into its explanatory schema!) Suppose a biologist detects the proliferation of cancer cells and examines their growth and spread, the mechanism of their production, the factors promoting the disease. If he tries to interpret what he observes, is he "justifying" it? The attempt to explain may be, but is not necessarily, a myth. Why is discerning something new an ideological illusion? As though discovering the technological system qua system could justify its reality. Actually, I have observed that all the people who have become aware of that reality have a negative attitude toward it; they are fearful, anxiety-ridden, and sometimes even panicky. The ascertained reality is the exact opposite of what Lefebvre maintains. Far from justifying the situation, the discovery of the technological system normally seems like an attack against technology, a criticism of technicity per se. Any shedding of light on the technological structure is always received by technologists and intellectuals as an indictment of that structure, even if absolutely no value judgment has been expressed. Hence, Lefebvre's vaguely Marxist denunciation is off-target. The various critiques of the notion of a technological society mainly expose the ideological character of their authors. ***

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But we have to transcend the idea of the technological society. For technology has reached a new scope and organization. This book will investigate its specific structuring. I realize technology exists as a system, that is to say, an organized whole. Further on, I will discuss that in detail. But for the moment, I would like to state that I also intend to elaborate on a model as well as describe a reality. The main difficulty will stem from the ambiguity between those two entities. When I investigate the specific features of technologies as an ensemble and the theoretical functioning of that ensemble, then I will obviously be dealing with a model. But this model is based only on real givens, and it takes an entire aspect of our world into account. The impression of a model will be heightened by my ignoring dysfunctions. The dysfunctions of the system and its feedback, its correction due to errors, will be the subject of another book. However, the concept of a technological system requires us to define our society more precisely. It is not enough to call it a "technological and technicized society.” Yet, conversely, can we identify the society with the technological system? Is the latter everything? Or has the society itself become that very system? Has the society been so thoroughly transformed as to become–so some people think–a megamachine? A mechanism expressing the technology in everything, translating it into all aspects and forms? All the things making up the societal life-work, leisure, religion, culture, institutions–all the things forming a loose, complex whole, enclosing real life and giving man both a reason to live and an anxiety–all these things were "torn apart and more or less irreducible to one another.” And it is easy to state that they are now technicized, homogenized, and integrated in a new whole, which is not the society. No more meaningful social or political organization is possible for this ensemble, every part of which is subordinate to the technologies and linked to other parts by the technologies. "All that reigns is the eternal substitution of homogeneous elements." In regard to both the social reality and the natural or human reality, technology operates as an enormous abstraction factor. The idea of a "virtual society" is already finding acceptance and crops up in numerous authors. It corresponds to what I analyzed in The Political Illusion (politics in the world of images). There is no meaning. There is an abstracting of all activities, all kinds of work, all conflicts, which are located in a presentday reality, that has no depth. For instance, as Baudrillard has noted, in his writing on the consumer society, we are incapable of considering the rationality of

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the objects we consume. Thus, when watching TV, we are incapable of knowing that this miracle is a long social process of production, which leads to our consumption of images. For technology wipes away the very principle (social) reality. Everything that is social has moved to an abstract level, with the strange phenomenon of an acute awareness of nonreality (for example, the passion for politics) and an unawareness of reality (for example, technology). Now this shift of relationship is actually due to technology. It is technology that presents the nonreality which is mistaken for reality (consumer goods or political activity). Technology does this by its own process of distribution, the image. And it is technology that "hides itself" (Of course, this is not deliberate. There is no anthropomorphism here!) behind that luminous play of appearances. This is exactly like certain modern watches which not only hide the mechanism under the dial face (as has always been done), but also conceal the numbers and reduce the hands to practically nothing. All this for an aesthetic charge, an extreme ornamentation, or an exquisite design, with the function of the watch itself well-nigh vanishing beneath the decor. This is exactly what is happening today in the relationship between the social reality and our vivid and colored apprehension of a nonreality, which has no other function than to camouflage the mechanism and satisfy us with the "miracle mirage." But what if we do live in a virtual society, if our attention is thus distracted and captured? What if all the things that used to constitute society are now integrated as separate factors in the technological system and beguiled by technology? If all that is true, then haven't we passed into the stage of the megamachine? Hasn't our society itself turned into a machine pure and simple? That is what N. Wiener thinks (he conceives of society as a cybernetic system). And so does L. Mumford (The Myth of the Machine, 1948), though with a totally different connotation. The megamachine is the completely organized and homogenized social system, in which society functions like a machine, with people supposedly as gears. This kind of organization is due to a total coordination, to the continuous growth of order, power, predictability, and, above all, control. The first megamachines were Egyptian and Mesopotamian society, where this organization achieved almost miraculous technological results. The system will reach its most perfect expression with the help of modern technology, in the future of the technological society. Certain authors hold that the megamachine performs because of the computer. "The diabolatry of the machine is nothing next to the

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conformism of society," says Elgozy. The megamachine functions implacably–and the very meaning of individual liberty has vanished in it. It has the coldness, indifference, and anonymity of a machine. It certainly does not try to victimize or alienate man; it simply does so in order to exist. The more order becomes essential to the functioning of the megamachine, the more order engenders order, and the slightest disorder becomes intolerable. Thanks to the media of information and communication, the megamachine also exhibits certain features of a primary society. Each person is known in his totality (which is registered in the national computer). The computer gathers a cluster of previously scattered information about each individual, making the control of society unbearable, especially since this control will be exercised not just by "authorities," but also by the public, the "others," by public opinion. This is so because everything concerning each individual can be diffused and revealed to everyone else by telecommunications. Thus, the megamachine functions on an abstract level as a social machine and on a totalitarian level by stripping all parts of the machine of their identity. This primary trait reflects MacLuhan's idea that TV is turning the world into a global village. A fact that is even more acute if it involves not only the ubiquity allowed by TV and the rebirth of mythic thinking, but also the control of each individual by means of information. From this perspective, the technological system ultimately transforms society itself into a technological system. This is a danger (or possibility) tempting many creative writers. But curiously, sociologists can also accept this reduction of society to a machine. No matter how mechanistic or deterministic one may be, it is clear that no society has ever functioned in that way. It is an illusion to believe that Babylonian or Aztec society was a mechanism. This might be said of the institutions, the framework, the form of the society. But the social reality, within and below, was totally different. The very idea that these historical societies were megamachines tends to point out the confusion. For if our society is a machine, then the cause is not to be sought in the technological growth of our civilization: Yet it is precisely the technological system that could have such an outcome. I believe, however, that it is highly dangerous to make use of such an apocalyptic vision. It is really quite easy to prove with facts that our society is not mechanized. On the one hand, it is full of short circuits, jammings, chaos, and also huge nontechnicized voids; on the other hand, man in this society has not really been

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mechanized to the point of being just a gear. Michel Crozier rightly points out the importance of interhuman relations in even the most bureaucratic system. In reality, we must not confuse the technological system and the technological society. The system exists in all its rigor, but it exists within the society, living in and off the society and grafted upon it. There is a duality here exactly as there is between nature and the machine. The machine works because of natural products, but it does not transform nature into a machine. Society too is a "natural product.” At a certain level, culture and nature overlap, forming society, in a totality that becomes a nature for man. And into this complex comes a foreign body, intrusive and unreplaceable: the technological system. It does not turn society into a machine. It fashions society in terms of its necessities; it uses society as an underpinning; it transforms certain of society's structures. But there is always something unpredictable, incoherent, and irreducible in the social body. A society is made up of multiple systems, multiple types, multiple patterns, on different levels. Saying that technology is the determining factor of this society does not mean it is the only factor! Above all, society is made up of people, and the system, in its abstraction, seems to ignore that. It is only at an extreme point that we can view the society and the system as one and the same. But nobody can seriously maintain that this extreme has been reached. We can thus say that the technological society is one in which a technological system has been installed. But it is not itself that system, and there is tension between the two of them. Not only tension, but perhaps disarray and conflict. And just as the machine causes disturbances and disorders in the natural environment and imperils the ecology, so too the technological system causes disorders, irrationalities, incoherences in the society and challenges the sociological environment. Of course, if it is wrong to call modern society a megamachine, we still should not forget that some people greatly desire to make it one. Here we are faced with the dilemma posed so magnificently by Kleist in "The Marionette Theater.” It is absolute alienation which allows mankind to receive grace–or else infinite consciousness. The latter being the attribute of God alone, man must be reduced to a puppet (and society to a machine) in order to find his original innocence and grace. Kleist does not appear to see how man will do that. But we know now. Thus, to achieve total liberty, exemption, and independence from natural as well as moral or social constraints, man must be in that state of perfect deindividualization,

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virtually of absence. The puppet acquires grace in absolute unconsciousness. (But for whom?) This sums up the argument of certain researchers who do not express themselves in metaphysical terms. Yet that argument underlies and justifies their investigation. That would be the position of the technocrats, who seek to subjugate all social reality to the technological system. We will have to examine this problem later on. But for now, let us discuss two aspects. One aspect is a very real, concrete, and worked-out project, for which the most serious researchers and politicians have been militating. It was presented in 1972 by the Japan Computer Usage Development Institute in Tokyo, and the goal is a society entirely technicized by the computer. This project would have to be implemented in stages, the first in 1977, the second in 1982. The starting phase involves an experimental urban unit of 100,000. Society is reduced to a certain number of cells (hospitals, schools, factories, offices, revenue agencies, courts of law, etc.) and a certain number of functions (production, development, performance, control, information, etc.). Each of these units is automated (which is not impossible). Man then becomes purely the servant of that totality. Next, all these cells and all these functions are connected through the computer. By now, the decision-making processes are no longer independent. A decision is the obligatory and inevitable result of those multiple connections. To the extent that an analysis could be total, this structure would approximate the famous megamachine. At the moment, there are numerous financial and methodological obstacles. But still, the intention exists. This intention is quite understandable, for the technicians can have no other aim than to expand their technology, which they are constantly perfecting. But their intention overlaps dangerously with that of the neoutopians. I have often attacked the neo-utopian trend on various levels.11 I do not comprehend by what aberration H. Lefebvre can be an antitechnocrat and preach utopia at the same time. Naturally, I know the glorious arguments about how utopia will open up the imagination and grant us a marvelous freedom. But precisely and concretely, I believe that this trend is actually a “new ruse of the devil" to trick us into entering the megamachine. We must remember that all utopians of the past, without a single exception, have presented society exactly as a megamachine. Each utopia has been an exact repetition of an ideal organization, a perfect conjunction between the various parts of the social body. Utopia presents a flawless totalitarian society, which finally assures

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man of equality, the future, and so on. The perfect organization allowing the squelching of political power. What characterized all these descriptions was that the utopia could not come true. Today, utopia is presented as wonderfully useful in that it gets us to invent what will be and has actually already been. Certain authors, reducing utopia to its smallest size, declare that man once formulated the utopia of flying, or the utopia of an immediate relationship with someone, or the utopia of seeing things that occur thousands of miles away. And presto! Such utopias came true! Yes indeed, because of technological processes. And we are told: Get thee to utopia, it is the reality of tomorrow. But we now learn how that reality is to be realized. Either it is a wild dream or else it will come true thanks to the progress of the technologies. There is no other horn to the dilemma. Since certain utopias have materialized, we are invited to formulate our utopias. Because, no matter how insane, they are going to establish a new kind of future. In reality, however, either a technology will grab hold of the dream and put it into practice, or else there will merely be smoke without any fire. Hence, the utopias of future societies strike me today as the dreadful seduction to realize my megamachine. The present-day utopians are the "decoys" of the technocrats. And we can rest assured that these technocrats are waiting only for a sign from the intellectual and spiritual elites of the social body to come swooping down in thick droves. The sole utopia is a technological one. And that may be the possibility for making the technological system and the technological society identical. Utopia lies in the technological society, within the horizon of technology. And nowhere else.

Needless to say, of the countless studies that have attempted to "define" our society during the past few years, I have picked out only a few of the best examples, deliberately ignoring the pseudo-realistic studies, the shortsighted and unperceptive discussions, and the disarmingly innocent pamphlets like Maurice Clavel's Qui est aligne? 2 David S. Landes; The Unbound Prometheus (1969). This book is the most remarkable history of Europe's industrial development during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But the chapter on the post-1945 period, commonly seen as a period of transition to technological society, is quite disappointing. Landes more or less sticks to identifying technology and industry and to highlighting the relationship between industry and economy. When he delves into the speed of technological change, for example, he studies only the technologies of industrial production. Hence, he contributes little to the investigation of the technological system. He merely confirms a certain number of principles that we have been able to derive by observing the industrial process (the relationship between science and technology, the trend toward concentration, the universal participation in technological development, the anonymity caused by that universalizing, etc.). 3 D. Bell, "The Measurement of Knowledge and Technology," in Indicators of Social Change (1968). 4 Nothing in A. Touraine's La Société post-industrielle (1969) justifies this qualification. When he categorizes it as technocractic in its programmed organization, its motives dominated by economic growth, we do not see why the decisive element is "the antiquated industrial" element. 5 The best analysis of the consumer society was certainly made by Baudrillard in the system of objects. For him, consumption is neither a material practice nor a phenomenology of abundance. It is not defined by food and the like. It is the virtual totality of all the objects and messages now organized in a more or less coherent discourse. Consumption is an activity of systematic manipulation of signs. But vast as Baudrillard's conception may be, he is unable to show that consumption was the same in any other era but ours. That is to say, consumption is as he analyzes it because it is based on technological objects, because it is practiced in an abundance, and because, finally, it is integrated in a more total system. It is only in this context that the systematic manipulation of signs finds both its reference and its possibility. 6 Jonas quite obviously understands nothing about this fact when he uses the term ideology for an attitude that consists in trying to determine the contents and nature of the technological phenomenon per se instead of being content with approximations or detailed investigations of several technologies. See Jonas, "Technik als Ideologie" in the collection Technik im technischen Zeitalter (1965). This criticism, taken up by Jürgen Habermas in Technik und Wissenschaft als Ideologie (1968) strikes me as being due to an a priori political choice. Considering the sociological analysis of technology as an ideology (whether a justifying or mystifying one) is really a way of preserving the explanatory schema drawn from Marx. But this is not the first time since 1904 that pseudo-Marxism has been used to conceal reality under a dogmatic explanation! 7 We have disregarded so many other formulas about our society; because they are too superficial (leisure), too general (masses), too old (urbanization). Yet for

each of these, one could make the same comment. If there is leisure, it is a function of the time that man gains by developing technological means. And these spare-time activities must, in turn, be organized along technological processes. Mass society is quite properly analyzed by Friedmann as being: mass production, mass consumption. mass culture. But these three phenomena, in turn, are directly dependent on the technological factor, which both permits and generates each oneFinally, urbanization is likewise sanctioned and produced by technology: industrialization, mechanization of farm work (which causes rural unemployment), means of transportation, increase in the distractions from urban pressures, etc. These elements are not exclusive characteristics of our society, and they are contingent on the same factor. 8 The point at which I disagree with Friedmann is when he speaks of a technological civilization. I am less certain than he that we are dealing with a civilization. He derives his outlook from M. Mauss's conception of the "complex aggregate of the factors of civilization." Today, these factors of civilization are the organization of work, mass production, mass mediamass consumption, mass tourism, etc., which add up to a technological civilization. See Georges Friedmann, Sept Études sur l'homme et la societor (1966). 9 H. Lefebvre, La Vie quotidienne dans le monde moderne (1968). Moreover, Lefebvre's entire essay Position: contre les technocrates is blemished by his totally confusing several different things: (1) the myth of the technocracy (the fact that people imagine that technology rules); (2) technocracy (the attempt by a group of technicians to exercise power, the actual influence of technicians on a political, economic, or administrative level); (3) the conformization of society by the technological phenomenon (4) the determining factor. In none of his arguments, in none of his discussions, does Lefebvre succeed in keeping the four elements apart. He continually switches around in them, which crucially weakens his debate On the other hand, it goes without saying that I fully agree with his criticism of technocracy when it quite deliberately presents itself as being able to solve all the problems of society with the appropriate technologies-something that is the prerogative of both the political right and the left. On this point, there was no great difference between De Gaulle, Marchais, and Tixier Vignancour. Furthermore, this unity of political thought is a mark of the decisive importance of technology. Lefebvre fails to see that the technocratic myth he condemns is merely the reflection of the primacy of technology-a primacy that is involuntarily recognized. 10 The concept of a technological society is indirectly challenged by Baudrillard. He calls it a functional mythology spawned by technology itself. His essay (which is excellent and, in all points, inadvertently confirms the notion of a technological system) repeats the standard Marxist argument that technology or the system of objects is what it is only because it is subject to a certain system of production, a profit motive. However, Baudrillard's conclusion does not come from analyzing the technological system as a whole. His is merely a structuralist analysis of objects in the environment, furniture, gadgets, etc. It is obviously quite easy for him to claim to be demonstrating that this system of these objects appears as an imaginary solution to all kinds of conflicts; that the profit motive is turning technology away from its true ends; that the minor perfecting of objects shores up a false idea of progress, masking the urgency of essential transformations (of society!). None of

this is wrong. But a general conclusion is based on a partial analysis of an object chosen especially for the demonstration. The lacuna is crucial. Baudrillard would have to fit this system of objects back into the technological whole, allowing for its logic. He would have to go way beyond the social conflicts (whose givens are modified by the technological whole) and the means of production (which have been subordinated by the technological whole). Baudrillard's study is profound and his method is precise, but his conclusions are very superficial and valid only for the so-called affluent society. 11 See my books on revolution (Autopsie de la révolution and De la révolution aux révoltes) and The New Demons.

1 TECHNOLOGY AS A CONCEPT

PART ONE What Is Technology?

In my early studies on technology, I employed this term as a concept without explaining it, thereby giving rise to countless misunderstandings. The technologies used in all possible domains, so I felt, had enough common features for us to deduce a general concept. It is common knowledge that, while nobody has ever seen "the dog," we can still find enough common traits in a spaniel, boxer, great dane, pekinese, pincher-despite all the differences to understand one another perfectly when we use the word "dog.” I certainly do not want to get into the quarrel of the universals. Nor will I claim that in some empyrean there is a concrete idea per se of absolute technology. But I do claim that, scientifically, I can construct a phenomenon from the features of, and the interrelations between, the phenomena generally known as "technological" in our society. For this society, in which technology has become dominant, is the first to have the concept of technology. Certain people now declare that "technology" does not exist, and that they know only plural technologies. Such a notion, however, comes from a shallow sense of realism and is obviously unsystematic. Technology as a concept allows us to understand a set of phenomena that remain invisible even where technologies are perceptibly manifest. But while the concept may be indispensable for comprehension, it is by no means clear and simple in itself. Nor does it imply the existence of a technological system. We will not recur to the problem of defining technology. But we are going to examine the genesis of this concept in reference to modern reality.

***

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The terms "technique" and "technology" cover a large number of phenomena and have several meanings. The difficulty is that these meanings refer to various realities: concrete realities (the technology of the internal-combustion engine); objects of scientific study; and finally, strata of diversified technologies in time. Originally, it seems, people spoke of "technique," which, consistent with its etymology, meant a certain manner of doing something, a process or ensemble of processes. Diderot thus speaks of the “technique proper to each painter.” But rapidly, as the machine and its industrial application came to dominate, "technique" (and then "technology" in English) began to designate the processes of constructing and exploiting machines. People now more frequently employed the plural. These were then studied by a science called technologie in French and technology in English. (While English uses "technology" for both the science and its object of study, French distinguishes respectively between technologie and technique. Trans. note.) This science consists in describing and analyzing these techniques (French), i.e., technologies (English), in tracing their history and investigating ways of improving them. At the end of the nineteenth century, the science of technology was divided into five branches, which is quite indicative of what was then known as technique (or technology). These five branches were: raw materials; processes and machines bearing upon the home (plus clothes and food); hygiene and health; light and heat; tools and instruments. Scientists soon distinguished between instruments and energy sources. The classification of technologies was now by: tools and instruments; machines; apparatuses. Tools and instruments are material systems for increasing the efficiency of human action. Notably, they give man access to phenomena with an intensity that is too weak to act directly upon the senses (measuring instruments), or else they multiply the intensity of his efforts. From a technological viewpoint, these tools and instruments have the characteristic of being directly operated by man. Machines are material systems replacing man for actions he cannot perform himself, most often because they require too much energy. Finally, the ambiguous term "apparatus" designates both complex instruments and machines using a small amount of energy. Naturally, each area combines several tools, machines, and instruments in order to perform an operation correctly. Thus, the division of labor multiplies the number of technologies, which themselves produce machines.

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Hence, technology was seen no longer as a parceling operation, but as a "set of inanimate or exceptionally animate beings, organized to replace man in performing a set of operations defined by man" (Louis Couffignal, Théorie de l'efficacité de l'action). Technology thus has two new features: It no longer relates to just an aspect, an action, but to a whole, a set, an ensemble. It refers above all to machines that tend to replace man. And among these machines, one distinguishes: those that furnish energy; those that utilize energy (power machines replacing man in his processing of material); and those involved in information (operational machines replacing man in his operations of creating, transforming, or transmitting information1). On this level, "technology" scarcely refers to industrial operations. The stages of technology are readily compared to the stages of industrial growth. These stages are dictated by energy production. Observers thus speak of the "first industrial revolution," characterized by the use of coal as a power source, and by the machines built to use coal. Then came a second industrial revolution, characterized by electricity. The third one causes some wavering: the use of atomic energy. But for several years now, people have been speaking of a fourth industrial revolution: the one launched by the computer. It is obvious that we are now switching gears, for this is no longer a change or advance in power sources. The dominant factor is no longer a growth of potential or exploited energy, but rather an apparatus of organization, information, memorization, and preparation for decision-making, to replace man in a huge number of intellectual operations. We can see that all the above stages are linked to the use of machines and specific technologies. But technology is then viewed as a reality that is independent of more or less improved practices and of machines. Technology as a whole has a general character in relation to individual technologies, but it does not leave the area of machine application. Nevertheless, a new meaning soon appeared. It became more and more obvious that these technologies and machines had vast consequences for human behavior and societal organization. People now began speaking of the "technological society" (Georges Friedmann, "société technicienne"). Using ”technology" in a wider sense, they began studying the machine not only in itself, but also in its relations to man and society. (We will not examine here this social science of technology studied as the "industrial society.”) Nevertheless, at that time-twenty years ago-the term "technology”

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was limited to the strict meaning of a scientific study of technological processes with no reference to sociological dimensions. For the latter, people spoke of a sociology of the machine or of technology. However, a new concept was already emerging. On the one hand, technology could apparently be defined very broadly in terms of what had implicitly been its overriding feature since its origins: efficiency. People could now say that technology was the ensemble of the absolutely most efficient means at a given moment. This allowed unhooking technology from the machine. For there were so many other technologies than those coupled to machines–for instance, sport technologies. Moreover, this definition had a great advantage. It reminded us that technology was made up of means, all means, but that we could focus only on those regarded as the most efficient at any moment, because that was the very criterion of choice and progress in the technologies. In other words: Wherever there is research and application of new means as a criterion of efficiency, one can say that there is a technology. The latter is not defined by the instruments used or by some area of action (clothing, transportation, etc.). There are perfectly abstract technologies (for example, speed reading). Yet the same word was employed to designate the parcellary, mechanical technologies and technology in that latter sense. Americans waver among technics, technique, and technology. They frequently employ "technology" for what the French call technique in the general sense that we have just defined, rather than for the science of mechanical "techniques," as in French. But this word did not achieve a varied gamut corresponding to the diversification and complexification of the phenomenon itself. Scholars observed that individual technologies, applied to different domains, react upon one another, which makes it impossible to study them separately. On the other hand, technologies were becoming more and more numerous, gradually encroaching upon the whole field of human activity. They took on a new consistency because of their very number and density. Finally, these two factors were joined by the computer. The data processor is an element of connection, of coordination among a huge number of technologies, just as in itself it is the product of diverse technologies conjoined. People thus came to a new conception of technology, as an environment and as a system. That is to say: The combined technologies, affecting the totality of human actions and life-styles, took on a qualitatively different importance. Technology

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was no longer an addition of "techniques.” By combining and universalizing, observers had now given it a kind of autonomy and specificity. This is the point we have reached in the domains of both accomplished and established facts, ergo, of scientific analysis. This analysis is hard enough and risky enough for the social science of technology (the study of its effects on human groups). But it is even more difficult and hazardous for the study of technology as an all-inclusive and all-including system and reality. Yet when we try to formulate the concept of technology, are we constructing a model? "Concept" does not necessarily mean “model.” Today, we know that in many human sciences, the model" is an ideal emergency exit.2 Constructing a model enables one to have an irresponsible attitude. After describing a certain sociological phenomenon, one can state, in case of error, that the goaI was not to describe a reality, but rather to construct a model "to see how that works.” However, people forget that if a model is remote from reality we may see the model working, but its workings will explain nothing. It is exactly like a man who claims he can explain how a painter creates his work. The man takes a puzzle representing a canvas by that painter and starts to piece the puzzle together. He will wind up with the picture, but he will have shown only how a puzzle works and not how an artist paints! Hence, I do not claim to establish a model. I want to give an account of reality, but on a certain level of abstraction. I will approach Max Weber's ideal type (see Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, 1972) by stressing one or several viewpoints, dwelling on certain phenomena, linking facts that seem isolated, in order to achieve a homogeneous whole. It is not a model because I claim that the whole is truly homogeneous, but cannot be seen as such due to epiphenomena, accidents, and, at the other end of the scale, the incognito aspect of interrelations. Thus, what I am constructing under the name of concept, then system, may look like a model in that we ask at the outset: "Is looking at the facts in this way useful for understanding?" rather than, "Are things really like this?"3 But we will rapidly leave this stage in order to consider not how the model works, but what its problematics are. That is to say: What is questionable about the model in and of itself. At that point, we will integrate the destructive process of the model in order to give an account of reality. And from there, we will go on to question the very fact that serves as the origin of the model. That will establish the critical relationship between the model and reality,

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and we will avoid both the rhetorical discourse of a philosophical technology and the easiness of setting up a model with no external problematics.

*** In any case, the present concept has the crucial advantage of underlining the specific character of technology and sidestepping the habitual confusions. C. Wright Mills quoting Lionel Robbins, for example (The Sociological Imagination, p. 80), rightly says: "It is not an exaggeration to say that, at the present day, one of the main dangers of civilization arises from the inability of minds trained in the natural sciences to perceive the difference between the economic and the technical.” These are confusions between technology and science, between technology and the machine, which we have already abundantly talked about. And then there is the even more frequent confusion between technology and economy. The instant one tries to differentiate them, Marxists accuse one of diversionary maneuvers and antirevolutionary idealism! And yet, so long as we fail to study the technological phenomenon beyond its economic implications and the problems of the economic system and class struggle, we are doomed to ignorance of contemporary society (and hence, impotence for any revolutionary action). Economic progress and technization are not synonymous. Technization does not have an economic aspect from the very outset. Today, if there really is a (potential and debated) kinship between technological and economic growth, there is no kinship whatsoever between technological growth and economic development, as we shall see. A good example of the superficial view of the matter is provided by Rocard, ("La Crise de la recherche," Le Monde, May 1970). He keeps mixing up technology with its economic use, especially its “capitalist" and De Gaullist use. Since discoveries have an economic end, he says, the only question is whether economic growth “permits satisfying the aspirations of the entire society or only maximizes the profits of a tiny number.” The problems (the real problems, of course, and which I do not contest) are those that radically prevent our discerning the structure of our society and that cause insoluble difficulties. For instance, Rocard feels that the capitalist structure hinders a complete utilization of technological discoveries. But he does not explain why the system manages to work rather well in Japan and West Germany.

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Thus, the first step in elaborating on the concept of technology is, obviously, to isolate it from untold connected phenomena that are not in the realm of technology. Or else, they are-at first sight, inextricable-mixtures of technologies and other factors (political, familial, psychological, ideological, etc.). A failure to isolate the concept in order to first consider it in itself will spawn countless mistakes. For example, in the questions we ask ourselves about technology per se. A good catalogue of wrong questions on technology (wrong simply for lack of rigor) is supplied by the World Council of Churches in a document summing up the many writings that raise these questions.4 This document actually lists the problems to be studied: the necessity of an environmental policy, the world food problem, the establishment of national and international structures for a more equitable use of technology, city planning, new problems of the oceans and space, the consequences of genetic and biological progress for controlling and improving life, the creation of new consumer needs, a revolution in producing and storing information, the effects of communications technologies on education and on conditioning public opinion. All these questions, none of which is wrong, are raised with no previous study of technology per se.5 However, if we study facets of the phenomenon but not the phenomenon itself, we must wind up with mistakes and/or platitudes. Remarkably, these experts, in a second chapter, ask about the "politico-economic consequences of technology" without realizing that the first chapter studies only the consequences and not the cause itself. But how can we speak of consequences without first asking: consequences of what? The authors act as if everyone knows a priori what technology is. A brash assumption. Which, of course, results in a lot of shallow work by the World Council of Churches. We have to avoid proceeding along such lines. First, we have to analyze the fact itself, which can be done only if we establish a concept, separating technology from its cluster of economico-political factors. However, such a procedure does not imply that technology will hereafter be considered in itself, as a self-sufficient entity. That would lead to a further and opposite error. Clearly, one cannot perform an intellectual operation of abstraction and then stop dead. We have to consider things as they are and not carry on about a

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technology per se, even though that is what countless authors are doing-i.e., describing technology as though man, economy, politics, and society simply did not exist or were still a perfectly malleable clay. Take D. Rorvik, for instance. His unbelievable books, Brave New Baby (1972) and As Man Becomes Machine (1971), contain a huge catalogue of what certain advanced technologies are bringing about. And once again, we cannot tell from these descriptions whether they bear upon technologies that are already acquired and mastered, or ongoing experiments whose results are not yet known, or a scientist's hopes of success, or a research project, or the conviction that twenty years from now we'll attain something or other. Rorvik presents: the machine man, the "kibert," the direct link between the brain and the computer; electronic medicine; the generalized use of robots; E.S.B. (electronic stimulation of the brain, which he translates marvelously into electrosex, electromemory, electroeuphoria); A.R.M.S. (a cybernetic system allowing the extension of the senses and of work to thousands of miles away); B.F.T. (bio-feedback training to separate the mind from matter and liberate the body); etc. And Rorvik (like A. Toffler, by the way) offers all these things as the reality of technology in the near and sure future. A lab technician does a few experiments-like putting fifty electrodes in a guinea pig's brain-and that, we are told, is going to be the normal, everyday situation tomorrow. And nobody wonders about the moral and psychological obstacles set up by men, or about the economic difficulties of putting such enterprises to general use, or about the political and sociological problems involved. Everything happens as in a dream world. The great wizard discovers a new technology, his magic wand touches reality, and presto! Everything is transformed. To be precise, I am not passing judgment on any particular technology, I am simply trying to point out that there is a world of difference between the laboratory discovery of a technology and its universal application. All sorts of discoveries have seemed possible at a given moment, and yet ultimately they did not materialize. Bear in mind all the density of reality. It is not the "dangers" in the growth of those technologies that frighten me, but rather the childishness of the authors who believe that these technologies are already here and that tomorrow's world is today's laboratory. To speak of a machine that lives and thinks, or even reproduces itself is infantile anthropocentrism (Von Neumann). Jean Claude Beaune declares that the machine has a superrationality "testifying to the

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strength of a creative thought of its own norms, founded on a new world full of noise and senses.” But that is pure phantasmagoria. again, this is precisely a focus on aspects of technology (mainly computers); and Beaune is pushing them to an extreme as if they were the reality. But technology is inevitably part of a world that is not inert. It can develop only in relation to that world. No technology, however autonomous it may be, can develop outside a given economic, political, intellectual context. And if these conditions are not present, then technology will be abortive. Once again, the magicians who tout the machine as the perfect substitute for man, as thinking so much better than man because it can think "outside the tumult of passions" (Beaune), are lapsing into the same error. They are considering an aspect, one facet of the technological phenomenon, but not the technological phenomenon itself Only by knowing this phenomenon in its totality can one measure both its newness and its limits. Obviously, if we picture plural technologies, next to one another, then we can always imagine their indefinite development. But if we study a system in which the technologies correlate to one another and we perceive that the system is not closed, then we also have to realize that we can neither anthropologize the technologies nor imagine their indefinite development. That is why we have to start by conceptualizing technology and flatly rejecting the hyperbolic and phantasmagorical depictions of tomorrow's society à la Godard's Alphaville. This is a mythological picture of civilization, which is not about to, and indeed never will, come true. Like 2001, it is as alien as it is both horrible and perfectly reassuring. An author constructs a monstrous and imaginary vision of the world to come, and then he attacks it-which he can do with impunity, since it does not correspond to any social structure or any group. This also plays a part in the development of the system, as we shall see further on; but it is downright false in regard to technology. And whether the mistake is due to overgenerosity, as in Rorvik, or to horror, it comes down to the same thing: this is not technology, this is not "the world of tomorrow." Ferreting out a concept of technology allows a precise measure of its possibilities by establishing its totality and by placing the technological phenomenon in relation to the context in which it develops. On the other front, it allows us to assert the autonomy of technology and prevents us from falling victim to the equally simplistic optimism of a Charles Reich (The Greening of America,

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1970) who sees everything as occurring solely on the level of consciousness. To control technology, "it suffices to take hold of controls that no one is holding. We have to fill a void, put an intelligence where none exists. . . .” It's that simple. Once again, a touch of the magic wand, but instead of the explosion of the universal use of advanced technologies, we have a miraculous control by a simple awareness of the entire system. Technology itself produces "Consciousness III," which is that of man as a free and spiritual adult. Hippies everywhere. It "suffices" if the system of values changes, if psychological behavior is transformed, if the way of life is transformed, and poof! Technology has no more power. The triumph of long hair and bell bottoms, proclaims Reich, guarantees our mastership of technology. "For the choice of a lifestyle is an act of transcendence of the machine, an act of independence, a declaration of independence. We are entering a new age of man.” Watch out on the right, watch out on the left. Of course, Rorvik is correct when he underlines the enormous growth of technological potentials and the prodigious gamut of possible uses. But he is wrong when he believes that technology develops within the perfect void of a closed balloon. Reich is correct when he, conversely, emphasizes that nothing can be done without consciousness and that consciousness plays a preponderant role in fashioning the society. But he is wrong when he believes that a change in consciousness is in itself the transformation of the technological system. One man dreams of the perfect malleability of man and society, the other of the perfect malleability of technology. Conceptualizing ought to help us avoid both mistakes. By its intellectual rigor, the concept will prohibit us from going off course. Far from removing us from reality, its very abstraction (if the work is done right) will allow us to take account of all reality and prevent us from forgetting any of the correlations in which the concept is located. Thus, our primary work does not consist in dillydallying in the field of possibilities, culling an iris here, a heart transplant there, or a lily of the field, a thinking computer. We have to come up with a system that takes into account different elements as well as their being factors of the realities that condition and are conditioned. By working out a concept, we have "to grasp things as they are" and not be swept away uncritically into any random direction in which our hearts happen to carry us! Under these conditions, we absolutely have to establish the difference between the concept of technique and the concept of

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technology. It is a grave error, often made by French intellectuals imitating Anglo-American usage, to speak of technology when they really mean technique. The former is a discourse on technique, a science of technique. First of all, it is a discourse on different techniques (English, technologies); then an attempt at discursing on technique (English, technology) in general, i.e., actually on the concept itself. This, however, is not intended as a study of the procedures of some-say, industrial-operation (That would be the subject of technical courses!); the goal here is a philosophical reflection. Now the latter is actually uncertain only so long as we do not start by determining the very concept of technique (English, technology) and the système technicien (the technological system). At this point, the logos becomes a kind of abstract dissertation without references. It is all the more interesting in that, according to the customary mania of philosophers, this is a discourse on technique (English, technology) per se, in any era, in any environment, as though it were possible to identify Western technique (English, technology) before the eighteenth century with present-day technique (English, technology). Simondon directly tackles the technological phenomenon itself, and in these terms he does good work rather than producing a chimerical discourse. In contrast, we have a fine example of empty discourse, using the Anglicism "technology," in Beaune's book La Technologie (1972). This effort is adorned with all the pompous rhetoric of structuralism, post-Marxism, and modern linguistics in order to sound deep. It supplies four or five definitions of "technology" without avoiding the simplistic pitfalls (the machine lives and thinks) or the most elementary confusions (we cannot judge the technological phenomena because "the object is indifferent to the phantasms that we bring to bear upon it," etc.). This is an utterly naive labor, which is given a scientific appearance by the rhetorical system. As such, it is quite "technological.” A simple discourse about nothing that has been clearly conceptualized. (In this English version of Ellul's book, the translator, with the author's permission, has gone along with American usage by rendering the French technique as "technology.” J.N.) 1

Thorstein Veblen may be the first to introduce systemization into the phenomenon of mechanics when he describes it as being characterized by a "rational procedure" and a "systematic knowledge." But the center of his reflection remains the application of the machine to industry i,e., the production of economic goods. In contrast, Max Weber (The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, 1947) gives "technology" such a wide meaning that it is almost useless for sociological study: "The term technology, when applied to an action, refers to the totality of the means employed as opposed to the meaning or the objective of the action. Rational technology is a choice of means that is consciously and systematically oriented according to the agent's experience and reflection and that consists of scientific knowledge on the highest level of rationality." See the

discussion of these definitions in John Boli-Bennett's remarkable study Technization, 1973. 2 See A. Sauvy's excellent critique of the model mania, Croissance zéro? (1973). 3 See Hamon, Acteurs et données de l'Histoire, vols. 1 and 2. 4 Report by the Church and Society Department of the World Council of Churches, prepatory for a study of the future of man and society in a technological world, October 1969. 5 In any event, to understand the concept of technology and the technological system, we cannot start with technology's effects on man or society. Sociological or psychological considerations will not lead us back to the concept of technology. We have to focus on the technological object itself and its interrelations, as has been admirably done by Simondon, Du Mode d'existence des objets techniques (1956). The countless studies on alienation, the impact of television, work organization, the effects of mass media on voting, urbanization, etc. can be useful afterwards. They can then help us understand certain aspects of the technological system. But we cannot take off from them to work out the concept of technology. We have to begin on the highest level of abstraction and then proceed to the reality. constituted by technology's relationship to man or society.

2 TECHNOLOGY AS AN ENVIRONMENT EVEN when technology is abstract, a procedure, an organization, it is far more of a mediation than an instrument. People generally conceive of technology as a means of action allowing man to do what he was unable to achieve by his own means. That is true, of course. But it is much more important to consider that these “means" are a mediation between man and his natural environment.1 This mediation can be either passive or active (clothing, dwellings, technological products are screens placed between the body and the surrounding environment). Man has thus created a whole set of mediations all around himself. So long as technologies of traditional societies were sporadic and fragmentary, they represented singular mediations. The overall situation has changed with the multiplication of technologies and the development of the technological phenomenon.2 Now the character of that mediation is already that of the technological object. As Simondon emphasizes: "Concretization gives the technological object an intermediary place between the natural object and the scientific representation of the abstract," i.e. primitive technological object, which is a far cry from constituting a natural system. It is the translation into matter of a set of scientific notions and principles that are separate from one another. . . . On the other hand, the concrete, i.e. evolved technological object approaches the existential mode of natural objects, it tends towards inner coherence, towards closure of the system of causes and effects; furthermore, it incorporates a part of the natural world, which is involved as a condition of functioning." It has often been said that work is what makes the human being the mediator between nature and mankind as a species. If this is true, then technological work creates for itself the most immense

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set of mediations imaginable because the work is incorporated and lasting: "Through technological activity, man creates mediations, and these mediations can be detached from the individual who produces them and conceives them. The individual expresses himself in them but does not adhere to them. The machine has a kind of impersonalness, which allows it to become another man's instrument. The human reality that it crystallizes within itself is alienable precisely for being detachable. . . . The technological object, conceived and constructed by man, is not limited to just creating a mediation between man and nature. It is a stable mixture of the human and the natural, it contains the human and the natural, it gives its human content a structure resembling that of natural objects, it can be inserted into the world of natural causes and effects in that human reality. The relation between man and nature is not merely experienced and practiced in an obscure fashion; it takes on a status of stability, of consistency, which makes it a reality having its own laws and its orderly permanence. Technological activity, by putting up the world of technological objects and universalizing the objective mediation between man and nature, reattaches man to nature with a far richer and more definite bond than that of the specific reaction of collective labor." (Simondon)

All those things are perfectly true. But we have to add that this mediation becomes exclusive of any other. There are no other relationships between man and nature; the whole set of complex and fragile bonds that man has patiently fashioned-poetic, magic, mythical, symbolic bonds-vanishes. There is only the technological mediation, which imposes itself and becomes total. Technology then forms both a continuous screen and a generalized mode of involvement. Technology is in itself not only a means, but a universe of means-in the original sense of Universum: both exclusive and total. The same is manifest in the relations between individuals or between individuals and the group. Here too, everything becomes technological. Human relations can no longer be left to chance. They are no longer the object of experience, of tradition, of cultural codes, of symbolism. Everything has to be exposed (group dynamism, psychoanalysis, depth psychology), elucidated, then transformed into applicable technological schemata (pedagogy, human relations, etc.). This is done in such a way that each individual adds his construction and also plays the exact role that is expected of him. Only then does he have full gratification for himself, and the others are gratified by his conforming behavior. The code has become technological. Baudrillard has marvelously

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described that in respect to communion. Speaking about televised sports, he shows that they have an important function: participation. The participating athlete and the participating spectator each gets what he wants: the athlete, the pleasure of being on the tube; the spectator, the feeling of being part of a whole "in contact.” They get what they're after: communion. Or rather that modern, asepticized form of communion: communication, "contact.” What distinguishes the consumer society is not the deplored absence of ceremonies. The telecast game is as much of a ceremony as the eucharist or as the sacrifice in primitive society. Now, however, the ceremonial communion does not go through bread and wine which are flesh and blood. It goes through mass media, which are not only the messages, but also the broadcasting devices, the broadcasting network, the broadcasting station, the receiving apparatuses, and of course, the producers and the public. In other words: "Communion no longer passes through a symbolic support but through a technological support. It is in those terms that communion is communication.” Baudrillard here puts his finger on the most profound mediating reality of technology: Technology is the support of interhuman communion. But this communion, no longer symbolic, has turned into sheer technological communication. In this way, and because man has entered a single, centralized, and exclusive model of mediation, technology has become a mediator. One can, of course, say that technology has always been that, and that it is only that by its very nature: As a means and an ensemble of means, it is obviously a mediator, an intermediary between man and his ancient environment.3 This, however, has three vast consequences. The first is that we are dealing with an autonomous mediation. It is common knowledge that the most important thing is not so much the choice of a value as the possibility of a mediation between the value and the individual or the social body. Technology, as the sole mediator now recognized, actually escapes any system of values. Is there, then, no other mediator to make a choice for or against technology, to find the means of subjugating it? Man? Which man? The one who is already incorporated in the system? How about the state? But the state has already become technological. The people? The nation as a whole? (According to the carefully nurtured myth that the people have to decide on the "great options," and technology has to carry them out!) But the people are half a century behind the reality, and they understand nothing of the real problems that arise! At most, if the popular decisions were applicable, they could halt technological

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growth, interfere with the system, and provoke a socio-economic regression, which the aforesaid people are in no way ready to accept! Thus, mediation by technology excludes any other, and this allows technology to entirely escape the desired or supposed values. No doubt, we have the impression that the intermediary of man or of the masses or of public opinion is what brings about each development, each orientation of technology. But let us not forget that we are dealing with a man who is already within the system and on whom the pressure is brought to bear. And this pressure is exerted not only by the existing reality, but also by the foreseeable and expected possibilities. Technologies now make it possible to shape desire, and public opinion forms on that basis. Yet, in its turn, public opinion exerts pressure in demanding the fulfillment of the desire. A small example: All experts are now unanimous that auto accidents are largely caused by speeding.4 A very simple measure would appear possible. Car manufacturers might only install engines having limited power. If an engine could not go beyond sixty-five miles an hour, then a large number of the dangers and laws could be done away with. But no one seems to have envisioned this solution. Because as soon as it is possible to manufacture engines and cars that can do one hundred twenty miles on the highway, the technological possibility exerts a pressure of necessity on opinion. For modern man is situated in that environment. And public opinion, in turn, would not allow the manufacturers to curb the speed of their engines or prevent a possibility from coming true. One may therefore believe that the pressure of consensus is what mediates and controls. In reality, it plays that part only to the extent that it is preformed, adapted, and obedient to any technological possibility. But it has no more independence or specificity. The second consequence: The mediation by technology is essentially sterile and sterilizing, contrary to all previous systems of mediation, which were plurivocal, equivocal, unstable in their applications, and also deeply rooted in a rich and creative unconscious. Technology, on the other hand, is univocal, superficial, but stable. It involves clear and orderly mediation, but without playing or evoking, without remembering or projecting. It is a truly efficient medium, and it has imposed itself in lieu of poetic mediations. It sterilizes all around itself anything that could disturb that rigor. It gives man a sterile universe with neither germs nor microbes. Finally, the third consequence: the relation between technology

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and man is nonmediated. The social or individual consciousness today is formed directly by the presence of technology, by man's immersion in that environment, without the mediation of thought, for which technology would only be an object, without the mediation of culture. The relation to technology is immediate, which does not mean that consciousness has now become the simple reflection of the technological environment. That is what, say, MacLuhan means with his celebrated formula: "The medium is the message.” The message that man is trying to transmit has become the pure reflection of the technological system, of technological objects, of images and discourses which can only be technological images and discourses on technology. For the system permeates the totality of experience and social practice.5 "The focus on the technological object, a passive focus, attentive only to the functioning, interested only in the structure, fascinated by this spectacle without a backdrop, fully absorbed in its transparent substance, that focus becomes the prototype of the social act.” Thus the mediating technological system becomes the universal mediator, excluding any other mediation but its own.6 That is the highest degree of its autonomy. Mediatization by technology is fundamental to understanding modern society. Not only does technology mediate between man and the natural environment and, to a second degree, between man and the technological environment; but it also mediates between men. People are more and more in contact with one another because of technological instruments (the telephone) and psychological technologies (pedagogy, human relations, group dynamism). But also, each person enters into contact with humankind, the totality of men, through technological devices (TV, radio, etc.), launching the reign of what has been dubbed long-term relations. These are qualitatively different from short-term relations, which are nonmediated (or mediated by highly ineffective traditional cultural approaches). This technological mediatization of human relations produces a phenomenon that never stops amazing us: the growing sense of individual solitude in a world of universalized communications. Having become a universum of means and media, technology is in fact the environment of man. These mediations are so generalized, extended, multiplied, that they have come to make up a new universe; we have witnessed the emergence of the "technological environment.” This means that man has stopped existing primarily in his "natural" environment (made up by what is vulgarly called “nature": countryside, forests, mountains, ocean, etc.). He now is

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situated in a new, artificial environment. He no longer lives in touch with the realities of the earth and the water, but with the realities of the instruments and objects forming the totality of his environment.7 He is now in an environment made of asphalt, iron, cement, glass, plastic, and so on. Unless he is an aviator or sailor or on a mountain excursion during a period of leisure, he no longer has to know the signs of coming weather. Instead, he has an essential need to know the meanings of traffic signals. And even the problem of weather forecasting is no longer taken care of by a direct knowledge of the sky, the wind, etc., but by radio and TV weathermen. A person deals with the natural elements only through a set of technologies which is so complete that he is actually dealing with those technologies themselves. The natural environment itself disappears. We obviously have to make a comparison with the city, an essential product of technology. In the city, man perceives the natural elements only accidentally (parks, sidewalk trees). Nothing spontaneously natural is left here. And outside nature is reserved for spare time, relaxation, etc., given the decreasing importance of agriculture and the decline in the farming population. However, the substitution of the technological environment for the natural environment cannot be reduced to the phenomenon of urbanization. Work also produces the same rupture. The worker, for instance, no longer knows anything about the material he is working on. He only has to know the machines performing the necessary operations. And then soon, there is a second abstraction with automation. We can take all sectors of life and we will see the same trend everywhere. Children are brought up for this environment. A child does not have to know anything about the elements of nature, he has to know about factories and how to cross the street. He is technologically prepared to ply a trade in the technology. Technology is the living environment, not only because it excludes any direct relationship to the natural elements or modifies those that exist (water, air), not only because man's environment is now made up solely of technological objects; but because technology infringes directly upon man's life, exacting adaptations like those once demanded by the natural environment. The world in which man lives is that of his mechanical environment. This brings both a knowledge of that environment and an overall behavior relative to that environment. Man no longer seeks to know the natural environment as such. And that is why the technological mind is radically different from

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the savage mind. The thinking process is most likely the same, but it applies to a different area, which necessarily results in a certain mode. The mode of savage thinking was in accord and in harmony with the natural environment. When man finds himself in an environment that is becoming exclusively technological, the mode of savage thinking, which survives as such in man, becomes fairly useless. The savage mind is determined by the natural environment. Its application point is the natural environment. It shapes that environment by establishing the relationship between the human environment and the natural environment. However, it is the natural environment that serves not only as an environment but even more so as an interpreter for the relationship of man to himself and of men to one another. Substituting the technological environment for the natural environment produces a change in those relationships. A schism occurs among men, a splintering of natural groups, formal communication replaces communion, and the technological environment then serves as interpreter for the (false) relationships of men. For if we admit-and I willingly do so-that the savage mind is a constitutive part of "human nature," then the fact that it exists in an inadequate environment commits men not to community but to all kinds of schisms. This is particularly obvious in the difficulty or impossibility of symbolizing. One of modern man's greatest losses is the faculty of symbolizing. This faculty did and could function only in relation to the natural environment. Symbolization, which helped man to survive in a hostile world, has become inadequate for the technological environment, in which it has no use. Modern man is torn apart: Symbolization remains so profoundly inscribed in him after millennia that it cannot be annulled. But all in all, it has been rendered gratuitous, ineffective. It is even blocked because the environment of man today is utterly unsusceptible to the necessity of that process. The results are: escape symbolization, as in modern art; artificial symbolization (bearing upon technology but perfectly useless and meaningless, as we shall see later on). The approach to, the grasp, interpretation, and control of, the technological environment cannot take place through symbolization. As for the natural environment, symbolization is made perfectly meaningless here by the dominance of utilitarian technology. Our knowledge concerns an abstraction of the natural environment, which is grasped through finer and finer technologies. But the living environment is the mechanical and technological environment, which is studied directly as such. We would, for instance,

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be therefore dealing with the theory of vibrations and shocks as a total explanation for the living environment. This kind of study concerns not only a mechanical resource that the engineer has to utilize in his work, but the whole of the human environment. And there is no way of thus analyzing the human environment than by starting with the technological environment. Mechanics in itself constitutes an environment, and it, in turn, is merely a part (a tiny part) of the technological environment. Man now has to study his surroundings exactly as "primitive" man had to "study" his natural surroundings. First of all, in order to survive in them and then in order to try and master them and get as much out of them as possible. When we are dealing with an environment that is intermediary between the natural and the technological environment, namely the urban milieu, we have only one thought in mind: to transfer it into a purely technological environment. The urban milieu preserves a few aspects of the natural environment: a certain spontaneity, an incoherence in regard to man, a luxuriance, a diversity, an irrationality. Like the natural surroundings, the urban environment is both close and alien to man. Formed uniquely out of technological products, it is, nevertheless, not the technological environment per se, because its development was anarchic and not technological. Yet that is exactly what makes us so ill at ease. It does not have the rigor, the simplicity, the rationality of technologies. Man has introduced his disorder here, he has turned these surroundings into his own thing. The streets are dirty and crowded, there are mysterious nooks, there is wasted space, the lines are not clean, and nothing is functional. This is not just the "conflict" between medieval towns and automobile traffic. It is, far more deeply, the product of traditional technologies, a product that man has humanized and that fails to satisfy our impetuous desire for subjecting everything to exact technologies. The Swedes have managed to do so. By dint of rigorous planning and an efficient system of public transport, they have succeeded in renovating the center of Stockholm and creating new suburban towns out of nothing. They have achieved a near-perfect technization of the urban texture, and thus, of course, they have produced an agreeable milieu. Not only is the technological rationality satisfied. But the latter can also be agreeable if correctly employed. We now realize that people need so and so many places of relaxation, so and so many square yards of green space, so and so many socio-cultural appurtenances, etc. And yet Stockholm is tinged with a certain anxiety. As

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though people were wondering what is to come once this perfection is attained. And then what? What is there beyond paradise? Urbanism remains a problem even when everything has been worked out. Is this "man's eternal dissatisfaction" or the difficulty that a still primitive man has in adjusting to an environment that is utterly technicized, though agreeable? We cannot answer this question today. Nevertheless, it is true that now, as modern men, we are called upon not to employ technologies, but to hue with and among them, Rorvik can, assuredly, describe the idyllic marriage of man and robot. But the problem is more subtle. Our adaptations to natural realities, going back to remote ages, have now become useless. What good is knowing how to tell a mushroom from a toadstool or how to steal up to a deer? We have to adjust to a new set of realities. We have to train new reflexes, learn technologies for using the brain, for appreciating art (itself an expression of the technological society), for establishing human relations through the intermediary of technologies. The technological environment is no longer a set of resources that we sometimes use (for work or distraction). It is now a coherent ensemble which "corsets" us on all sides, which encroaches upon us, and which we can no longer do without. It is now our one and only living environment.

*** Nonetheless, we have to avoid a misunderstanding. People habitually speak of an artificial environment made up of objects. For several years now, they have belabored the point of the invasion of the objects. Georges Perec's Les Choses is significant. We live in an object universe. And Baudrillard has even made a system of these objects. That universal presence, that need to make up for that existential fault by owning a lot of things, that process leading to the reification of man, which I myself have studied-all those things certainly exist. But we have also noticed that these objects are not lasting and are made to be thrown away. These objects do not exist by themselves, they replace one another in rapid succession. They are totally valueless; they have an obvious momentary luster when acquired; then they stop being truly useful, pleasant, familiar, they are no longer our companions. They are really made, in full use, to be destroyed and cast away. The invasion by the objects is accompanied by the scorn for those very same objects. These two facts must be viewed together. There

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is not a proliferation on one side and, on the other side, an appended remark: the replacement. In point of fact, things are made to be destroyed, bought to be discarded, multiplied in order to be eliminated. Objects are the object of our profound scorn. But why is that? In reality, these objects have no value or importance whatsoever, they exist only as products of the technological mechanism. What characterizes this society is not the object but the means. It is not the invasion by the objects, but the multiplication of means ad infinitum. Modern art bears fine witness to that structural reality. This is profoundly corroborated by the fact that it ultimately makes no difference what technology bears upon, because technology allows anything to be done. And if there is a proliferation of objects, it is not a phenomenon in itself nor a response to a human desire, but rather it is the direct effect of applying technological means. Only the means are glorified. Products are not valued very highly. We need only consider the communist goal. An equal sharing of products and incomes is not at all satisfying. The real point is to control the instruments of production. The stakes are not greater consumer power but ownership of the technology. Of course, the Leninists are ignorant of any correct analysis of the technological society; and in formulating their demand, they do not realize what they are doing; but they are spontaneously obeying the scale of real values. And if we regard objects as the reality surrounding us, then we have to watch out for the more and more widely stated belief that the object ultimately does not exist-anymore than the subject. The sharp traditional distinction is vanishing. For the sake of what? Processes of involvement, structures of functioning. We will have to show elsewhere that structuralism is not a creative way of thinking, but the simple product of the primacy of the means. How "it" works. But this is exclusively technology. This is the universe dominated by technologism. However, there is one very interesting thing about this philosophical trend: It reveals that, in order to give elbowroom and free play to the superordinated activity of the (technological) means, the subject must not exist: the subject must only obey the means. However, the object must not exist either: the object is merely an unimportant product of the workings of the technologies. Which is exactly what that philosophy states. We thus reach the decisive conclusion that our universe is not a universe of objects, that it is not a system of objects, but a universe of means and a technological system.

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*** The fact that the technological environment has become our living environment obviously entails a certain number of modifications in the traditional environments within which human history has unfolded. Let us use the schematic terms, nature and society. Nature, now technicized, and society, now technological, are no longer what they have always been. In fact, this change may be viewed as the final question of our study; but at the outset, we have to take a few quick looks. It is probably unnecessary to stress the action of modern technology on the natural surroundings, on that nature which is itself a product of human work, albeit with soft technologies and without involving an endless control. We need merely point out the admirable studies by B. Charbonneau in particular (Le Jardin de Babylone, Tristes campagnes). More abstractly, however, we have to understand that the new environment acts by penetrating and bursting the older ones. The old (natural) environment is not really abandoned in favor of the new (technological) one. Rather, the new one permeates the old one, engulfs it, utilizes it, but in order to become the phagocyte, and disintegrates it-like a cancerous tissue proliferating in an earlier noncancerous one. The simplest visual example is the way the city world encroaches upon rural areas through the spread of the suburbs. The technological environment could not exist if it did not find its support and resources in the natural world (nature and society). But it eliminates the natural as a milieu, supplanting it while wasting and exhausting it. Technology can become an environment only if the old environment stops being one. But that implies destructuring it as an environment and exploiting it to such an extreme that nothing is left of it. In other words: The well-known "depletion" of natural resources (which we shall come back to later) results not only from abuse by the technologies, but also from the very establishment of technology as man's new milieu. Technology acts upon these environments first by dividing and fragmenting the natural and cultural realities. The process of technological encroachment upon reality always consists in breaking up reality into malleable fragmentary units. This breakup corresponds to the scientific discovery of discontinuity: "Scientists have discovered separable units (atoms, particles, phonemes, chromosomes) in the heart of temporality. . . . This investigation of the

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discontinuous is reaching through all areas. . . . Things that change, things that seem to come into being, are defined by an arrangement of elementary units."8 This analysis reduces all motion to elements and a motionless whole. Machines operate on those givens. But science's reduction of reality to discontinuity is transposed by technology. Reality is broken up into elements that are actually (and not theoretically) separated. Thus, each element can be used by itself. It can be rearranged and recombined, it can be quantified and classified in any way. But here we are dealing with both a new system technological) and the concrete reality in which man is forced to live. Technology reduces a whole to simple units by analyzing it and generally compartmentalizing it. The Taylor work method is a model example. Craftsmanship was once a complex ensemble of undivided gestures and operations; it expressed the laboring individual and it produced a complete whole, a "work.” The division of labor and then Taylorization brought greater efficiency and interchangeability, but at the price of splintering and dividing work into perfect and indivisible gestural units. The work gesture was totally separated from the worker's person and existed on its own. This led to fragmenting the primary datum in all domains. Next, technology took up these utterly simplified elements in order to reconstitute a new whole, a new synthesis, integrating the natural factors, which were previously disintegrated. But this technological whole is not at all "gratifying" for man (perhaps because he remains traditional). Man still feels as if he were living in a splintered universe. A splintered society (Even though it is more thoroughly unified than ever!), a splintered, incoherent life. The wholes established by technology do not make us feel complete or satisfied; they are still experienced as splintered wholes. Here and there, man recognizes and greets a fragment of his former universe, integrated in a functional but alien and anonymous whole, in which he nevertheless must live. There is no other. Against that feeling of splintering, modern man feels a keen desire for all-inclusiveness, for synthesis. But, alas, any synthesis produced by anything but technology fails and comes to naught. There is no possible arché, nor any return to earth. Man is dissatisfied for being man; and this dissatisfaction, which we know up to this point, cannot be avoided. For in regard to all the environments that technology invades (and it now invades all of them), it is inevitably simplifying, reductive, operational, instrumental,

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and rearranging. It reduces all that was natural to the fragment of a manageable object. And anything that cannot be thus managed, manipulated, utilized, is rejected and discarded as worthless. On the huge debit side of possibilities, value is placed only on things that can be utilized. Anything else, which for the moment is not yet the object of technology, is abandoned to contingency and chance in a technological society. We thus have the double aspect of simplification and reduction of all reality by all technology. On the one hand, we have a rigorous system that performs without fail; on the other hand, a terrain that we consider unknown, absurd, "having destroyed in advance the values that were able to give meaning to freedom.” Thus, in the complex tissue of (social and human) reality, technology cuts out what can constitute an environment, but neutralizes and designifies anything it does not keep. However, since the technological system is essentially dynamic (far more so than the ecosystem), technology tends, blindly, to replace the totality of what formed the natural ecosystem. Technology keeps conquering more and more, assimilating and reorganizing endlessly. Ultimately, the "ideal" for this new environment is to exist to such a degree that nothing else exists. Such, basically, is the dream of authors like Rorvik. But there's a rub. The old environment has not totally disappeared. We still have air and water. And even man cannot do without them as yet. This is essentially what causes the irrationality and the system crisis as we see it. For the moment, let us remember that there has been a decisive reversal. Man once lived in a natural environment, using technical instruments to get along better in it, protect himself against it, and make use of it. Now, man lives in a technological environment, and the old natural world supplies only his space and his raw materials. Ultimately, the technological environment thus presumes to replace all of the natural environment, performing all of its functions. But obviously, we will never reach the old complexity of the natural environment (a complexity that we discover more and more as we destroy it). We cannot reach it because technology simplifies. We still have to ask whether that complexity was necessary to human life. (We will study this topic later.) But there is no imitation, no reproduction of that natural environment. There is only a creation of a new environment, even though in many cases we are forced to replace natural mechanisms, which turn out to be indispensable. Thus we keep introducing more and more exterior regulations. One of the fundamental laws of ecology is that we can achieve stability

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through ever-growing complexity. A complexity of modifications and exchanges in the environment, which allow a diversified adaptation. When we replace a complex natural mechanism with a simple technological mechanism, we make the ecosystem "more vulnerable and less adaptable." Now this solution by the technological environment (simultaneously the condition for its expansion) applies to both the natural and the social environment. (In the social milieu, the complex mediations of a traditional society are replaced by the rationalized and simplified relations of a bureaucracy-in the technological and positive sense of the word.) This environment thus has features linked to the efficiency of technology. But they are dangerous-at least to the extent that we do not exactly know the complexities of the ecosystem (reduced to a supporting role) that we are destroying. We discover them by the consequences of their disappearance. Needless to say, this environment is totally artificial (which is not a criticism; the natural does not have an eminent and normative value for me). Each factor in this environment results not from the combative creation of a living whole, but from an addition of processes that can be isolated and combined as artificially as they were created, ex post facto. Each factor can be examined, measured, isolated from the rest because we establish the connection; and we can test the result. The technological environment is in fact characterized by the growth of abstraction and controls. It is obvious that in such conditions, the technological environment scarcely favors spontaneity, creativity. Nor can it know living rhythms (which are obviously tied to the natural environment9). We will come upon this question again. The artificiality means essentially that only artifacts can enter this environment and that man can relate only to them. Anything else cannot be part of the environment, it would not harmonize, which is perfectly intolerable in the technological environment. There is no way to picture a car engine with a little grass or some flowers. Such additions may be a charming fantasy, of course; but they are incongruous. Without claiming that the technological environment is equivalent to an engine, the comparison is a good one. Only the artifact can enter this environment, for it is made in such a way as to fit in exactly. It is "made for.” Which cannot be said of any of the natural elements. Hence, the artificialness of the technological environment causes it to be absolutely exclusive.

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And this is also translated into the economic and social forms. Observers, for instance, emphasize that statics have disappeared and been replaced by dynamics. Some, like J. Leclercq (La Révolution de l'homme au Vingtième Siècle), even dwell quite triumphantly on this fact. Property (capital) is losing its importance to know-how. Raw material is becoming secondary to the product. The stress must be placed on action and not on passivity-just as man's isolation, triggering stagnation, has given way to the worldwide relationship, socialness, community, public services. In reality, all these things, which are accurately pointed out, are the visible social signs of a passage from a natural to a technological environment. It used to be nature that imposed its evolutionary rhythm upon us. Now it is technology. It used to be nature that determined certain social structures (Bodin's and Montesquieu's famous theory of climates). Now it is technology. It used to be nature that meted out the raw materials. Now the crux is the technological processing. It used to be nature that required man to establish fixed laws of relations between objects and himself (property). Now, the objects, emerging from a constantly renewing technological action, are no longer so important. What counts is know-how, which enables us to fit in precisely and find our places in the technological environment. This technological environment forces us to consider everything a technological problem and, at the same time, to lock ourselves up in, enclose ourselves in, an environment that has become a system. Let us take the first aspect. We now have a certain frame of mind, a certain way of looking at situations. We automatically regard every issue, every situation in terms of some technology. We are disabled when we have no technology to deal with some administrative or psychological matter. We have to reduce a situation to technological terms so that it truly becomes a technological problem. A typical (though anecdotal) example: Madame P. Sartin writes an article in Le Monde (April 1973): "Woman's Status in Our Society: A Technological Problem.” The contents of the article do not matter. It is the title that is highly significant in linking the two concepts, status and technology. A person's status in society, a complex, ambiguous problem tied to infinite variables, is suddenly boiled down to a technological problem. Study the problems of the woman's condition with some technicians, modify a few factors, and you will change her status-that is to say, both the opinion about women and their opinion about themselves, the experienced

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social hierarchy, the metaphysics of love and of the complementary opposition of the sexes, etc. No! It's all a dream. There are, indeed, a few technological issues in that question: the woman's dilemma of home vs. a job, the use of psychological knowledge, and so on. And yet the woman's status is not a technological one! But Madame Sartin is typical in being convinced that it is. I could cite a hundred analogous examples showing to what degree we think we are living in a technological environment. On the other hand, it is quite true that the more technological factors we get involved with in fact, the more the problems raised are really technological problems. There is thus an actual growth of technological problems, which makes us infer that all problems are technological. The further we advance, the more vulnerable we become. We depend more and more on systems. The natural mechanisms tend to get out of order and have to be replaced by technological mechanisms. Hitherto, any difficulties were of a natural order; but with the mechanism of replacement, they become technological. When we can no longer have drinking water furnished by nature, our water supply will depend on factories that purify polluted water or desalt ocean water. Under such conditions, a water shortage will be due not to a climatic drought but to a breakdown at a plant. We can generalize this example. The technological environment makes problems and difficulties technological. Though not all so far. Finally, there is a trend toward a genuine enclosure in this environment. And this strikes me as particularly important in language. Linguistic studies (and not just structuralism) tend more and more to reduce human language to a certain number of structures, functions, and mechanisms giving us the impression that we now understand this strange and mysterious phenomenon better than before. But what modern linguistics really does is to reduce language in such a way as to make it fit neatly into this technological universe, trimmed down to an indispensable communication for the creation of the system. Language is losing its mystery, its magic, its incomprehensibility. It no longer expresses dreams. Or rather, by being technologically deciphered, language becomes a way of bringing dreams, inspirations, aspirations, and ecstasies into the technological environment. Today, it is out of place to make fun of the many hermetic jargons emerging everywhere. This use of bizarre words ("perfect a praxeological approach," "optimalize decisions," "explore qualitative fields of

3

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action," "parameterize future possibilities," etc.) is a desperate effort to grasp the new "technological reality" by means of language. It is intellectual hypocrisy to mock an attempt at fitting language to this environment. But this striving is innocent. The true aggression is the technization of language. For at this moment, everything is locked up in the technological environment. When speech is a serf, everything is a serf. Language is the ultimate outlet, the ultimate questioning, even if it is reduced to a shriek. But the "it" and the "one" who are speaking tell us that the technological lid has clamped down, and that this universe is closed. Our modern linguists are heatedly working toward that end. At this point, we ought to go into Tzvetan Todorov (Theories of the Symbol, 1977). According to Todorov, the romantic crisis was a total upheaval. The classical conception of identity, of the unity of the world and language, involved an imitative behavior (mimesis). This was followed by the image of a diversity, an uncertainty (melodrama instead of tragedy), illuminating the difference, with the whole thing resting on the concept of production. How can we fail to see the aesthetic, spiritual, and image-fraught expression here of the passage to technology and to the indefiniteness of technological production.

1

It is not useless to recall that the first satisfactory definition of technology that we find is by Max Weber, who sees it precisely as a means "The technique of an action refers to the means employed as opposed to the meaning or end to which the action is, in the last analysis, oriented. Rational technique is a choice of means which is consciously and systematically oriented to the experience and reflection of the actor, which consists at the highest level of rationality in scientific knowledge. . . . The ultimate meaning of a concrete act may, seen in the total context of action, be of a technical order; that is, it may be significant only as a means in this broader context. Then the "meaning" of the concrete act (viewed from the larger context) lies in its technical function; and conversely, the means which are applied in order to accomplish this are its 'techniques'. . . . The presence of a 'technical question' always means that there is some doubt over the choice of the most rational means to an end," Economy and Society, vol 1. p. 65. 2 Regarding that evolution, see Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, chap. 1.

Lefebvre clearly saw an aspect of that autonomy in describing the derivation of consciousness and of its social and individual forms technology, without the mediation of a thinking, a culture to give meaning. "Through the object, the consciousness reflects technology. The technological object with its both functional and transparent constitution does not receive a determined status": A city becomes a technological object, a package in the modern world of 1968. In reality, however Lefebvre gives numerous illustrations of the fact that technology has become a mediator. 4 There can no longer be any debate on this topic since the systematic analysis undertaken in West Germany from 1953 to 1969, A single figure for one set of automobiles and the same number of kilometers driven shows thirty-seven percent more fatal accidents and twenty percent more injuries when there is no speed limit. This was confirmed by the traffic "experts" at a round table in Paris during January 1970. France could prevent a thousand fatalities a year by limiting speed. But the round table remained pessimistic about the possibilities of applying such safety measures since they are unpopular. 5 The extreme weakness of H. Marcuse's analysis in One Dimensional Man is his failure to see that the appearance of such a man is the most direct result of the technological system, of, among other things, the autonomy of technology. Marcuse's attributing this change to a political or politico-social regime merely proves the inadequacy of his sociology and probably also testifies to his desire to escape by the skin of his teeth and to preserve some hope. 6 And it is as the exclusive mediator that technology ultimately foists its order, as we shall see below. It manages to impose itself even when, at the outset, man desires the opposite. I have shown-and Marcuse then took it tip--that National Socialism, starting with a philosophy of the irrational, a mysticism, a conception of the superman, ultimately denied all those things as soon as it became a technological system, a technological rationalization of the apparatus: an irrationalist position is never a force against the system; on the contrary. 7 Hegel realized the beginning of that metamorphosis when he wrote: "The tool as such keeps back man's material annihilation; but in this respect it remains . . . his activity. . . . In the machine, man sublates this formal activity of his and lets it work fully for him. However, the deception he practices on Nature . . . takes its revenge on him; whatever he wins from Nature, the more he subjugates it, the lower he becomes himself. He may process Nature by means of various machines, but he does not sublate the necessity of his labor; he merely puts off his labor, removes it from Nature, and he does not erect himself as living upon Nature as living; instead, this negative livingness flees, and the labor that remains for him becomes more and more machinelike itself." Realphilosophie 1, 327. 8 Lefebvre has done a remarkable study of this phenomenon in "Le Nouvel Éleatisme," L'Hoinme et la Société (1966), republished in Position: contre les technocrates (1967). 9 See John Boli-Bennett, Technization (1973).

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3 TECHNOLOGY AS A DETERMINING FACTOR1 THE sociologists, like the historians, of the modern schools no longer accept the causal in sociology or history. It is impossible to determine a direct and univocal causality. Phenomena determine each other mutually, we can describe interactions, establish correlations, analyze systems, make a phenomenon the factor of a whole, uncover differential structures. But it is impossible to say that one fact induces another, etc. We generally accept the idea of the factor. Nevertheless, the Marxist sociologists reject that notion, viewing it as characteristic of bourgeois agnosticism. They feel that so long as we maintain reciprocal interactions, a sociological analysis requires the schema of determining and determined phenomena (with the latter, incidentally, able to become determinants in their turn). It seems to me that the best method would be to take both attitudes into account. On the one hand, it is true that we can hardly speak of causality in sociology. Contrary to the exact sciences, we cannot isolate a phenomenon, examine it in a pure state, experiment, and repeat the exact conditions of the experiment. But obviously, if we never establish a relationship between the determinant and the determined, we will be limited to infinite and indefinite descriptions that are meaningless and hence incapable of explaining the "how" (without even claiming to seek an answer to the "why"). On the other hand, if we go by the Marxist method, we have a pattern" prior to any analysis; we know in advance what is the determinant and what the determined. The explanatory schema has been established once and for all (even if rendered flexible, as Plekhanov once did and Althusser is now doing). But for that very reason, we cannot be certain of grasping new structures, new types

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of relationships that differ from those analyzed by Marx. Hence, I believe that we have to try both to consider phenomena in their newness, their singularity, and to find the determining relationships between them by preserving the notion of the factor, which is the only acceptable notion. If I study a sociological phenomenon in present-day Western society, if I analyze its structure, its relations to other structures, as accurately as possible, I can obviously discover a large number of determining factors. If, for instance, I peruse the culture of juvenile gangs, I am obliged to consider the home background, the moral development, the habitat, the consumption of multiple goods and advertising, the distractions, the sexual precociousness, etc. All these factors are involved and form the general context for juvenile gangs. It is almost impossible to pinpoint one determining factor among them or even isolate two or three. It is ultimately their combination that offers a more or less approximate explanation. Let me instead consider one sociological phenomenon in its evolution instead of taking it at a given moment as a static datum. Among all the factors making up its context, I can perceive those that have evolved beforehand and whose change has come first. And I can prudently try to establish a correlation between those two successive changes. I will thus zero in a bit on the question while bearing in mind that there is always plenty of uncertainty, for it is very hard to analyze the context fully. The study of an evolving phenomenon can bring out the factor, which the static analysis has not revealed. Let us scrutinize what can be called a "problem," i.e., a sociological phenomenon that, because of its development, arouses intense positive or negative responses from individuals, creating difficulties in adjustment and anxieties. These problems may be more or less vast, relatively individual (the automation of a workshop as a problem for the workers), or universal (the bureaucratization of society). We can see that the determining factors are less numerous and comparatively easier to isolate in a "problem" than in a simple, neutral phenomenon. We are actually bringing in the dimension of "how the phenomenon is experienced.” This seems to complicate matters because we are considering a new kind of factor, a nonobjective one. In reality, however, that dimension makes our approach easier, for the knowledge of the opinion seems relatively assured. The involvement of the "experience" factor gives the others a certain coefficience of importance, which allows us to classify them.

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If, now, instead of considering one phenomenon or problem, I examine several belonging to the same overall society, what will happen? To the extent that they actually belong to one and the same society, they are bound to be in relation to one another. Of course, each is situated within a certain constellation of factors. But if I view these phenomena together, I notice that certain factors are peculiar to that constellation and do not bear upon the neighboring problems. In contrast, other factors are common to several phenomena or problems. Needless to say, the wider the scope of my research–i.e., the more phenomena and problems that I investigate in an overall given society–the further the number of factors common to them all will diminish. But we must then ask a twofold question. Are the factors that I preserve determinant in each case? Are not the determinant factors that I examine so general as to become meaningless? (For instance, one can certainly explain all present-day sociological phenomena by population growth, but this is too general.) Do not those determinant factors come into play only as "a remote cause," to the second or third degree, thereby no longer having an explanatory character? We therefore must be keenly attentive to the closeness of the relationship and proceed to the critique of the factor being investigated. There is obviously great danger in attempting to boil the multiple phenomena or problems of a whole society down to a single determinant factor. And that is the difficulty experienced by Marx's followers. Nevertheless, in an ensemble of factors that are taken as explanatory, it is not impossible to discern one that is more effective, more constraining. If, in the evolution of several phenomena, if, in the givens of several problems, we keep finding that same element, we have to accept it as determinant (and perhaps even assign it a coefficient of power that does not appear at first sight). If this factor allows us to take into account a large number of data in the society being examined, and if it permits us to understand the correlations and differential structures of those data, then we have to admit that this factor has a "strategic" place and an exceptional role. We thus have the two criteria that allow us to evaluate the importance of a factor. It is obvious that in an entire society we cannot cleave to the "punctiform" fixation of a huge number of data. We must try to account for their existence and trace their relationships. If one factor allows us to account for a larger number of ascertained data, it is bound to be more important and has to be taken as more

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determinant than another factor accounting for only a small number of data. The same holds for a factor that lets us explain a very large number of relationships. But this presumes our regarding the social data as data of relation and attempting to consider the large number of possible relations, which is not always the case. It goes without saying, incidentally, that such work entails the great danger of "forcing" data. And that too is something we often note in the Marxist sociologists. The instant we think we have a factor determining a very large number of data and relations, we are tempted to ignore those data that are contrary or on which our factor does not act. Even more, we are tempted to modify the data in order to insert them into our explanatory schema. Hence, the first rule is to admit that once a datum has been defined in itself, it must not be altered by any endeavor to relate it to what has been established as the determining factor of other phenomena. We will conclude these reflections on method with a final remark. If we look at the (sociologically) major problems of our whole society (Western/American, 1970) we will notice that most of them are posed in such a way that they appear to be made up of mutually contradictory givens. It is this truly perplexing feature that generally allows contradictory positions to be taken on them. In French or American society, we find, for instance, serious authors claiming that citizens are being depoliticized, and other, no less precise authors claiming that citizens are being politicized. In reality, the problem of the relationship between the citizen and the ruling power must be posed in terms of "politicizing/depoliticizing.” It is not an "either/or," but a complex of phenomena, which are apparently contradictory although correlative. A further example. In our Western society, a few sociologists speak of the "death of ideologies," while others show that ideology has a growing place and that everything is done and experienced in terms of ideologies. Here, once again, the problem must be posed as a complex of "the correlative death and growth of ideologies." And of course, the more inclusive the problem, the more important the contradictory or ambivalent character of the phenomenon. The point is not to seek multiple, diverse, and inverse causes for each aspect. The point is not to say, on the one side, there is a depoliticization affecting such and such an area and having such and such a cause; and on the other side, there is a politicization affecting some other area and having some other causes. This splitting of the phenomenon destroys its specificity. The important thing is to investigate whether there is a factor determining the

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inner contradiction of the phenomenon. If we find such a factor explaining the two contrary givens of one and the same phenomenon, then chances are that this factor is truly determinant, and we will also safeguard the unity, the specificity, and the intelligibility of the phenomenon under observation. These few explanations were indispensable. It was actually by applying this method that I came to conclude that in the sociopolitical problems of Western society as a whole, the main if not single determinant factor is the technological system. This wording will instantly provoke contradictions. Yet it is a perfectly evident and admitted truth to say that "’research’ (obviously what is known as "research and development") is the youth and future of societies. A country that abandons research . . . will be stricken with a mortal sickness. . . . Limiting research makes it patent that the very brain of society is sick, that its hope for survival is stricken" (Chombart de Lauwe). If research is so important, it is because it leads to technology and not to pure intellectual satisfaction. These current formulas point out that technology is the determinant factor in our society. I will examine a few problems of our society to justify my statement. The demonstration could be regarded as complete only if I presented this work for all major problems totted up in our society. But that is obviously impossible.2

*** The problem of Statism is assuredly a major and characteristic phenomenon in our society. But it presents a double and apparently contradictory aspect. On the one side, we are dealing with a growth of the state; on the other side, with a decrease of the political function. The growth of the state can be analyzed as a growth of function, organism, and concentration. It is easy to see how greatly the functions and competencies of a modern state keep increasing nonstop. It does not suffice to quote the formula about our passing from the liberal state of the nineteenth century to the welfare state of the twentieth century. Actually, during the past half century, the state has taken over education, welfare, economic life, transportation, technological growth, scientific research, artistic development, health, and population. And it is now moving toward a function of sociological structuring (national development) and psychological structuring (public relations). This simple enumeration points out that the

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present-day state has nothing in common with the state of the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries. The organism of the state has augmented along with its functions and areas of intervention. The point, however, is not so much the number or importance of its services as their complexity. In a word, each activity has become specialized, the connections between the parts of the organism are getting finer and finer, more and more numerous, and often questionable. In this multiplicity of services, which are more and more fragmented, new coordination services have to be created. This leads to a kind of second-degree administration, charged with administering the primary administration. At the same time, we are witnessing a centralization movement that is easily conceived. The more complex the body, the more the whole must be tied to one head. There is much debate about this centralizing. In reality, all the so-called decentralization efforts merely produce deconcentration, which actually intensifies the centralization. These three movements are all the more important to emphasize because they are taking place not only in traditionally centralized countries like France, but also in countries traditionally decentralized like the United States, and where the state was greatly distrusted. Yet, since 1936, the United States government has been increasing its jurisdiction and centralizing its powers. It would seem that, as a result, the function of the state, the political function, has been growing at the same time. But, on the contrary, we are witnessing the diminishing importance of that function, despite certain appearances that remain traditional. This decrease can be observed on two levels: that of the citizen and that of the politician. The citizen, as an individual, is less and less capable of an opinion on the real problems a modern state has to cope with. He has fewer and fewer possibilities of expressing his opinion or truly affecting politics. Elections, those temporary expressions of opinion, and even referendums have little influence on the workings of politics. The citizen must, in any event, be incorporated in a vaster body–a party, trade union, etc.–which will act as a lobby, a pressure group, a representation of interests far more than opinions. And in these groups, the individual has very little weight vis-à-vis opinion leaders or specialists. But even more, we have to realize that the individual has practically no means of defense against or pressure upon what has become by far the most important part of government action, the administrative function in the widest sense. In reality, the citizen can do nothing about administrative decision. We can thus say that the more important

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the state becomes, the less important the citizen (the theoretical bearer of political sovereignty). Remarkably, the same is true of the traditional politician; the congressman, senator, even the government minister, have less and less real power. Modern analyses of decision-making show that, on the one hand, the politician's role in this process is greatly reduced, and that, on the other hand, the true "place of decision" is often not the minister's office or the National Assembly. The famous distinction between "major orientations" and "current decisions or their application" assigns the former to politics and politicians and the latter to administrations. But that is a myth. The politician has less and less autonomy, if in no other way, then at least by being far more determined by earlier decisions when he makes a decision now. For example, in 1900, it was quite easy to reverse alliances. But in 1960, it is almost impossible to throw over an economic plan being carried out; and the plan that follows is inevitably conditioned by the previous one. The margin of political option is indeed very narrow. I will not dwell on the politician's lack of competence: that is too facile an argument. But the enormity, the complexity of issues make the politician highly dependent on research departments, on experts who assemble dossiers. And once the prepared decision has been submitted by the politician, it escapes him, and the agencies take care of implementing it. And we know that today everything depends on implementation. The politician has a façade role, he provides the showy front; and he also assumes responsibility for a matter of which he has only very shallow knowledge.3 What is the source of this double phenomenon? I believe that the reason for the system is technological growth. On the one hand, if the state is expanding its jurisdiction, then this is not the result of doctrines (interventionist, socialist, etc.), but rather of a kind of necessity deriving from technology itself. All areas of life are becoming more and more technicized. In proportion, actions are becoming more complex, more intervolved (precisely because of extreme specialization), and more efficient. This means that their effects are vaster and more remote while their realization implies the use of costlier apparatuses and a sort of mobilization of all forces. In all the technicized activities, a programming is now necessary. And this programming must have a national, often an international, framework. Hence, only the state organism is able to carry out this coordinating and programming, just as it alone is capable of mobilizing all the resources of a nation to apply one or

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several technologies; just as it alone is in a position to measure, and take upon itself, the long-term effects of such a technology. We could go into detail here and cite countless examples to show that in modern society it is always because of technology that the jurisdiction of the state keeps expanding. As for the growth of the state organism, one may be tempted to view it as a simple consequence of the increased jurisdiction, and to say: "The more things the state has to do, the more services it has to create and the more functionaries it has to appoint.” Naturally, that is an exact aspect of the problem, but it is only an aspect. Here too, there is a direct influence of technology on the growth and complexity of the state organism. We can already note an influence whose ultimate consequences we do not yet know: the use of all kinds of electronic machines in office work. In any case, this use is bound to transform bureaucratic structures, bringing a new analysis of tasks and hence a new legal analysis of administrative functions. But the thing that changes the state organism even more is the use of organization technologies. Here we are dealing with an imperative of efficiency that is, of course, bound to the growth of functions. We can no longer work with a bureaucracy comparable to the one that Courteline made fun of. A new bureaucracy is emerging, more rigorous, more exact, but also less picturesque and less "human.” These two movements are taking place together, and if there is, say, an effort towards deconcentration, the reasons are not ideological or humanistic; the goal is to attain the maximum efficiency of an administrative organism. And, vice versa, it is the action of technology that devaluates the political function, the role of the citizen and of the politician. The citizen is grappling with problems that are mostly technological. For the things the state has to decide on are most frequently technological (and more and more seldom purely "political"). It is not the citizen who may decide even the great aspects of an economic plan, for those aspects really depend on data established by technicians. Those aspects are located in a "bracket" that the technician fixes and they have consequences that the citizen is incapable of evaluating. Furthermore, a different sort of technology is transforming the condition and possible participation of the citizen: namely, the technologies of information and psychological control. I have shown elsewhere (Propaganda, 1965) that a modern state, though democratic, absolutely cannot forgo a certain psychological action tending to "form an opinion" and that, moreover, the citizen, drowning in floods of information, wants problems to be

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simplified, clarified, and explained–that is, he desires a propaganda to facilitate his political choices. Certain politologists therefore tend to say that the citizen's only role is to choose a "ruling team" (in terms of likings, of human qualities, and not in terms of ideology). But it is here that the politician's role is devaluated, a process also caused by the technization of society. In point of fact, the politician can exercise no control in the multiplicity of services. He depends entirely on three kinds of people: experts, technicians, and administrators (themselves technicians, of organizing and implementing). These people alone have the knowledge and the means of action. To be sure, the politician does have a way out. He can stop being a politician in the old sense of the term; he can specialize very rigorously in an issue and become a technician in that issue. (Keeping in mind that today one can no longer be a technician of economy, but only of a small sector of economy!) Does that imply the emergence of a technocracy? Absolutely not in the sense of a political power directly exercised by technicians, and not in the sense of the technicians' desire to exercise power. The latter aspect is practically without interest. There are very few technicians who wish to have political power. As for the former aspect it is still part of a traditional analysis of the state: people see a technician sitting in the government minister's chair. But under the influence of technology, it is the entire state that is modified. One can say that there will soon be no more (and indeed less and less) political power (with all its contents: ideology, authority, the power of man over man, etc.). We are watching the birth of a technological state, which is anything but a technocracy; this new state has chiefly technological functions, a technological organization, and a rationalized system of decision-making. That is the first–very summarily analyzed–example of the situation of technology as a determinant factor.

*** My second example is taken from a completely different sector. I want to discuss the major phenomenon of population growth as tied to production growth. It is hard to attribute a "cause" to population growth, for historians know that a sudden increase of population occurs at certain periods without our being able to pinpoint any exact causes. In particular, we cannot resolve the following problem: Is population growth the cause or the result of economic

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growth? Either side can be argued. In all likelihood, the two phenomena give rise to one another. Nevertheless, at the present time, the determining factor of production growth is indisputably the technological development. This point would be difficult to contest. But, less obviously, it would seem that in various areas, technology has contributed very greatly to population increase. These areas are the technologies of medicine, hygiene, ground drainage plus the improved standard of living and the creation of better adapted life-styles, which together allow, if not trigger, a rise in population. Technology wipes out the ancient regulators–infant mortality, famine, etc.-and we no longer believe what was a certain truth twenty years ago: namely, that the rise in the overall living standard and the wealth of food automatically cause a drop in the birth rate. The baby boom in the United States contradicts that earlier assumption. It is certain that at a rather low level, the greater possibilities of consumption already bring a surge of procreation. Without forcing things, I feel we can say that technology may not be the determining factor but a major determining factor in the two linked phenomena. We could then legitimately conclude that if the two phenomena are linked and have a major determining factor, the growth must occur in a harmonious way. That is to say, the production technologies allow a consumption of goods corresponding to the population growth. There might not be an exact correspondence; perhaps in some cases, the population curve would tend to exceed the production curve-or vice versa. There might also be differences in production, a wider and wider range of objects produced, so that not all the needs of the increased population would be exactly filled. But on the whole, the discrepancies could be ironed out, and we would note a balanced expansion. Yet we do not note any such thing. Far from it. We see that production growth is not adapted to the consumer needs of a greater population. It would even appear that we can speak of a growing divergence between the two curves. The population is rising a bit faster in absolute numbers in areas where production remains practically stagnant (just barely improved to allow the surge of procreation). Conversely, consumption is rising very swiftly in countries with middling population growth. Because of that double movement, the gap between the haves and the have-nots is widening ceaselessly. It is this widening gap that I wish to consider as a problem here. Hitherto, we have been faced with manifestly simplistic diagnoses

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and therapies. Some observers start with the fact that 3,200 calories a day are necessary for survival and that Western man consumes 3,800 or 4,000. Hence, we are told, cut down on your consumption and ship the rest to the poor countries. There is enough to considerably improve the situation of the undernourished by a more equitable redistribution of wealth. Morally, of course, it would be a praiseworthy act of justice, the distribution of agricultural surpluses would be legitimate. But this is no solution; first of all, because the extra food of rich countries would be of very little help to the others; and then because such a procedure would maintain a situation of people on welfare. It cannot be said that the problem is simply one of distribution and that the obstacle lies in national egotism or a lack of generosity. Far more serious is the attitude that the technologically overequipped countries are mishandling their output possibilities, and manufacturing superfluous or useless goods to the detriment of fundamentals. If the power of American and European production were reoriented toward indispensable consumer goods-food, clothing, basic tools-we could assuredly fulfill the demands of a growing world population for quite a long time. Instead, industry is developing far more rapidly in the areas of tape recorders or electric razors. This, supposedly, shows a bad trend in the use of technological power, which ignores the real needs around the world. The situation is accentuated even more strongly by the use of an increasing quantity of manpower for unproductive tasks. The goal should not be shorter working hours or a growth in tertiary activities, but rather the application of all the work forces to that essential production for the sake of the rising population. This thesis is forwarded very often and has every semblance of a rational analysis. Unhappily, I feel that it rests on a dubious presupposition and a dearth of overall vision in the technological society. The presupposition is the belief in a totally fluid adaptability of production forces and technological possibilities. "It suffices to decide" that we must produce more grain, more meat, etc.-with the conviction that if we do not make such a decision, the reasons are unwillingness, the capitalist structure of the economy, which is interested in the branches of production assuring the greatest profit. I believe that this is now inexact, and the presupposition strikes me as being based on an analytical error. The orientation of technological progress and its possibilities of application are extremely rigid. The first fact to take into account (well known and barely dis

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cussed) is that technological progress cannot occur everywhere at the same time. There are privileged points of technological progress; and, as we shall see, they depend essentially on previous technological progress, with the speed of technological growth tending toward a geometric progression. Thus, we cannot hope to perform a technological leap in the underdeveloped countries, starting with nothing. Brief as the phases may be, we have to admit that two centuries of technological progress in the Western world cannot be boiled down to five or ten years in Africa or Asia! Hence, the autonomous help to be expected from those countries in solving the problem of "population and consumption" will be slow and feeble. We certainly have to await a good deal from the highly technological countries. But that is the problem! Can we simply apply that technological power to that type of consumption? The thing that people are unaware of is that such a powerful technological progress creates a new universe. Now the usual hypothesis is, in a word, that we are dealing with a society that is traditional but that has an extraordinary productive power, and with a human being who is always identical but also a privileged consumer. If this were so, we could certainly tell this human being to consume less and this society to produce only the necessities for all people. Unfortunately, the hypothesis is wrong. The massive development of technology triggers a certain number of changes in the individual (especially by creating new needs that are in no way false or artificial) and in the society, which cannot maintain the same structures. Consider these two facts. Man cannot live and work in a technological society unless he receives a certain number of complementary satisfactions allowing him to overcome the drawbacks. Spare-time activities, distractions, their organization, are not superfluous; they cannot be done away with for the sake of something more useful; they do not represent a true rise in the standard of living. They are thoroughly indispensable in making up for the uninteresting work, the deculturation caused by specialization, the nervous tension due to the excessive speed of all operations, the acceleration of progress requiring difficult readjustment. All these things, which are brought on by technological development, can be tolerated only if man finds a new level of compensations. Likewise, the diversity of food, the increased consumption of nitrogenous foods and glucoses are not a gluttonous overload but a compensatory response to the nervous expenditure caused by this technicized life.

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We cannot ask a man absorbed in technological activities and an urban milieu to follow a uniform and mainly vegetarian diet. Physiologically, he would be unable to do so. Gadgets are indispensable for coping with a society that is more and more impersonal; remedies are necessary for adjusting. In sum, the tendency of productive strength toward these products, which are regarded as luxurious or superfluous, comes far less from a capitalist profit drive or the public's abnormal, immoderate desires. The true causes are needs that are strongly felt by people living in a technicized environment; and they simply could not continue living there if these needs were not satisfied. It seems that the more production rises, the more our society becomes technicized, and the more these needs grow in number and quality. Thus, productive strength is increasingly oriented toward satisfying these needs. But if there were no response to these needs (we should not have any illusions), it would not follow that productive strength could be applied to something else, something more useful. It would mean that productive strength would be blocked by a human impossibility of adapting to this sort of life. There would even, I think, be a risk of regression. Motives of capitalist cupidity play only a flimsy role in deciding upon useless productions. As the Soviet Union industrializes and becomes a technological country in its turn, the same articles are produced, corresponding to the same attitudes toward life. Men are not free to opt for a useful production; and the more production increases, the more it grows in secondary factors. But the needs to which it responds are futile only in appearance. They are actually irrepressible, even though they are created by the artificial environment in which man is obliged to live. The more the technological universe expresses itself in intense and continuous noise, the greater the need for silence, the more research and money must be applied to creating silence. The same holds true for the pollution of air or water. But here we are faced with problems that have to be solved not only by new productions, but also by services and organizations. We thus come to a second aspect that must be delved into. It is common knowledge that technological development brings a growth of "tertiary activities.” But this seems like an application of forces to activities that are not immediately useful, say, for the whole of humanity. Here too, could not advanced societies (as is sometimes proposed) do away with a few services in order to apply the full momentum to useful production? This too is impossible.

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For, in order to be technicized, a society must create a whole set of organizations permitting the development of technologies. It is impossible to simply "graft" a certain technological power on a “natural" society. A growth of production technologies requires a transportation network, organization facilities, distribution machinery, etc. (We know, for instance, that the food shipped to India by various nations reaches the points of raging famine only with great difficulty because of the lack of transportation. The excellent harvest of 1968 was partially wasted in India for that very reason.) The vaster and better the mechanism of production, the more complex and numerous the services of organization become. It thus appears that the forces of society are utilized in nonproductive fields. But in reality, the productive fields themselves can increase and improve only because of, and on the basis of, those organizations, those services, those agencies which represent sheer, nonprofitable expenditures, yet without which nothing could function. It may seem absurd to create psychological services everywhere and to study workers' problems in that light. But actually, the worker will cease to be a producer adjusted to his new technological equipment if he is not enframed and supported by such facilities. Moreover, we would be tempted to say that now, in a technological society, all progress in the area of production (industrial or industrialagricultural) is impossible without there first existing an enormous organization, of an active administrative type, which authorizes this progress and integrates it, unruffled, in the overall structure. We would like to maintain at this point that the growth of tertiary activities (a wellknown established fact) has two consequences. First, in the Marxist interpretation, the forces of production are called the infrastructure, and everything else-state, law, etc.-is a superstructure. However, I submit that in our technological society, the forces of production are no longer the infrastructure. They have become a superstructure. That is to say, they can develop and keep advancing only if there is a social infrastructure of organization capable of both producing the research indispensable to such progress and receiving this progress into the social body. The mechanism of production is now conditioned by services. It is no longer the interior of the technological world, the determining factor. As a second consequence, one could very cautiously cite a new aspect of the law of diminishing returns. We know that this law was

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formulated for agricultural output and is today judged incorrect. But it can, I feel, now be applied to industrial production. Let us say schematically that when technology is first applied to industrial output, the growth is in direct proportion to the technological progress. But the more this output increases, the more it requires a framework of multiple services. The technological progress then encompasses vaster and more complex ensembles, and only part of that progress can be directly applied to production. As we advance, the part applied to production diminishes proportionally. In other words an increased output of useful goods requires greater technological strength applied to sectors that are not directly useful. Hence, the growth in production of useful goods tends to keep declining at a constant progression within a technological system. Of course, this notion of decreasing useful returns is valid only under two conditions: if we look at overall production, and if the country being studied is highly technicized. This phenomenon can be observed only at a very high production level. However, we started with the idea that at the moment, it would have to be the highly technicized countries that assure the survival of the others. Yet this seems unrealizable. We simply cannot say that there is ultimately a choice to be made between producing grain and producing gadgets. At first sight, it appears to be an obvious fact. But this "fact" is based on an erroneous analysis of what a technological society really is. People habitually argue as if all kinds of societies were subject to the same criteria of judgment, showing comparable structures and the same process of development: a natural society (for instance, African or medieval European society), an industrial society (for instance, Europe in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries), and a technological society. It is likewise assumed that human needs have remained identical throughout those various types of societies. But that is far from the truth. A structural analysis reveals differences that are not merely quantitative but indeed qualitative, so that almost no comparisons are possible between those three types of societies. Concepts applicable to one are not applicable to another. There is no common yardstick. This explains the failure of China's industrial "great leap forward," which was based on the village blast furnace. Such differences in the nature of the societal types are determined by the growing complexity of the technological phenomenon, which must be considered as a whole, and not by detached pieces that can be used individually without the others. Beyond a certain degree of technization, we pass from a society

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determined by natural factors to a society determined by technological factors. Now in the latter society, there are changes in its structure and in human needs and attitudes. It is therefore impossible to argue without taking heed of those changes. Yet people ignore them when they claim to solve the problem of the survival of excess population by drawing on the productive capacity of modern technology. The change is, in reality, impossible. There is no parallel between growth in population and growth in productivity of goods needed for survival. Thus, the problem is raised because of the specific feature of technological growth. It is technology that appears as the determining factor, in respect not only to the two terms considered separately, but also to the problem itself, in its formulation as a problem stemming from a contradiction. I am not saying that aid to underdeveloped countries is impossible. But it must be handled differently than in political passion.

*** We have, in sum, chosen, not quite arbitrarily, as examples, two sociological phenomena that are the most massive in our era and have considerable scope. We have stated that their internal structures are marked by a set of fundamental contradictions, which seem difficult to explain. But both cases have a factor that appears to play a large part in the development of the fact itself and in the establishment of the contradictions that point it out. We have recognized that this factor is technological development, in very different fields of the application of technology. Of course, each of the phenomena observed has other constituent elements, perhaps as important as technology for each of them. But in neither case do these elements seem capable of explaining the contradictions in the system. And above all, we do not find the same elements from system to system. Whereas we do find the technological factor everywhere.

*** The technological factor can thus, it seems, be called the determining factor, even if a nonsignificant and nondifferential analysis of a sociological phenomenon (a quantitative analysis, for instance) does not allow us to grasp technology as the most important factor. However, I know to what extent the theory of the determining factor has been criticized.4 I will therefore have to specify what I

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mean. This theory is often reproached for artificially isolating several factors in order to give one a preference. Yet nobody is saying there is one cause. Rather, among the countless factors operating within a society, one factor, at a given moment, appears more decisive than the rest. This factor, in turn, has numerous sources–socio-intellectual, ideological, political, etc. But all of Hamon's criticism merely reveals that the technological factor is not independent of the "episteme," of economy, etc. He never shows that the technological factor is not ultimately the determining factor for everything else (since it too was determined). For what determines it pushes it along, as it were, transforming it precisely into a determining factor. We have to avoid generalizing. I am by no means saying that technology has always, and in all societies, been the determining factor (this is the kind of generalization that I rebuke in Marx). What I mean is that in our Western world (and we can generalize for the past twenty years), technology is the determining factor. Most authors who criticize fail to see the new character of the situation in our society; hence, the historical experience concerning the existence or unreality of the present determining factor is incommensurable. It seems to me that one comes closest to reality in speaking of a determining factor when it evokes a fact, a situation, and when it not so much creates the fact, as gives it a form, pushing it to the front of the stage, into the limelight of human attention (with the determining factor itself remaining in the darkness), and integrating it in other social factors. That is a work of catalysis far removed from creation ex nihilo. To that extent, the theory of the determining factor strikes me as correct; and in our time, this factor is technology. We must also ask ourselves what that factor determines, and we are tempted to draw up an inventory. If technology really constitutes an environment, one might be tempted to say that it determines everything. But no. That would be making the same mistake as Toffler, who claims we are entering an era of total and constant change, which is a bit juvenile. One could try taking stock, like B. Cazes in his excellent synthesis ("Vraies et fausses mutations," Contrepoint, 1971). Constants persist, "structural certainties" (Jouvenel), and Cazes feels, for instance, that the course of science, the political function, and the developmental laws of human beings are permanent necessities that never change. Nonetheless, if we retain what I defined as the determining factor, I will say that nowadays technology gives a different form to both the course of

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science and the political function and is bringing new integrations of those constants. Furthermore, Cazes insists on the destructuring impact of technology on all social, moral, and generally human realities, the acquired structures, the intellectual compartmentalizations, the social roles, etc. But if this challenge to the roles goes so far as to impugn the role division between man and woman, young and adult, specialists and nonspecialists, teachers and pupils, insane and sane, etc., then I feel we can say that technology, with such a destructuring effect, certainly has the character of a determining factor. On the other hand, we should not trace everything back to technology either. And, like Cazes, we must carefully distinguish between real, false, and apparent changes. *** We can, by using a far less complex method, show to what extent technology is a determining factor. Technological growth has a certain number of consequences on which all authors, whether for or against technology, are ready to agree. One group will cite these facts to prove the excellence of technology, the other, to demonstrate its danger. But all that is mere coloring. Everyone concurs about the basis itself. And we are faced with a rather impressive set of undenied consequences. It is almost impossible to list them all. We can only give a sketchy idea of them-while stressing that this is no return to the method of the "authorities.” It is not opinions that are the issue here, but facts on which agreement is implicitly established. As a whole, technology is viewed as radically modifying both human relations and the ideological schemata or the qualities of man himself. It is useless going back to William H. Whyte and The Organization Man, which many people will find too partisan. But we know G. Friedmann's synthesis (Sept essais sur l'homme et la technique), which shows to what degree man is transformed even physiologically by living in a technological environment. Friedmann pursues this theme in La Puissance et la sagesse (1970) in regard to mental illness, discussing the consequences posited by psychiatrists: a rise in psychoses, depressive states, anxieties, and maladjustments. Observers, it seems to me, are quite unanimous in blaming a large number of these phenomena on the existence imposed upon man by the technological environment. And we are basically back to what Charles Reich (The Greening of America, 1970), described as "Consciousness II.” His portrait of

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man as integrated in the technological system may be rather easily accepted to the extent that he criticizes the man of yesterday, let us say, of "industrial capitalism.” The utterly classical portrait, banal, drawn in broad strokes, resembles everything that has been said about the psychology and values of that man. It all seems to correspond to a certain reality when taken on that assuredly low but not inaccurate level. Nonetheless, we must also remember that for Reich, Consciousness III (quite positive in his eyes) likewise derives from the technological process. For, if he asserts that the revolution is produced by "consciousness," he simultaneously shows that this "consciousness” is generated by technology itself These sketches take up both the novels of the period (1930-1960) and famous studies like The Lonely Crowd or even White Collar. What seems to characterize man in his technological environment even more profoundly is the growth of the will to power. In my previous studies, I have tried to show that technology is a realization, hence an achievement, hence an increase, of the spirit of power, which led to a polarization of man in respect to power. This is brilliantly taken up and demonstrated by Bertrand de Jouvenel (Arcadie) when he meticulously studies the fact that modern wealth is the expression of the will to power. (Technological progress is essentially a manifestation of human power, a chance for man to admire himself. The development of power was the goal, with greater comfort as a by-product.) Likewise, technological progress, for man, is a variant of the spirit of conquest, which is both satisfied and reinforced by technology. This spirit of conquest causes the division of man into producer and consumer and his obedience to the imperative of efficiency. What is interesting in Jouvenel's study is not only his demonstration of the consequences of these well-known phenomena but also his insertion of them into economic theory. Be that as it may, this first group of simple findings points out a formidable change in the human being. Naturally, this cannot fail to have repercussions on what we call culture. And indeed, the technological impact transforms culture as well. Whether it is the appearance of socalled mass culture; or the change in human relations because of multiplied communications, which transform brief relations into long-term ones (Ricoeur); or even a changed atmosphere in the world because of the dynamics of information–whichever point is observed, we are witnessing a well-known change of that culture. Because of the technological demand, “general culture [i.e., general education] is a paper wrapping and

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its acquisition a mere pastime."5 This insipid and unimportant general education must be replaced by a technical education, with permanent training, for instance. But it is the very concept of culture that is modified, and not just its substance, its practice, or the ways it is acquired. "Every time the words general or educational crop up, they are instantly followed by comments that they mean an adjustment to technological progress, a better knowledge of economic mechanisms, or the improvement of know-how."6 A good panorama of this evolution was presented by J. Gritti (Culture et techniques de masse, 1967), especially with an attempt at analyzing "dialectical pairs": education/specialization, tradition/ modernity, encyclopedism/assimilation, gratuity/efficiency, effort/ pleasure, word/image, etc. Similarly, Baudrillard shows to what extent the culture and education issuing from technology are the absolute reverse of the culture conceived as: (1) the heritage of works, thoughts, traditions; (2) the continuous dimension of theoretical and critical reflection, critical transcendence and symbolic function. Both aspects are likewise negated by the cyclical subculture (made up of obsolescent cultural ingredients and signs) and by the cultural topicality. We can see that the problem of cultural consumption is linked to neither the cultural contents properly speaking nor the cultural public. The crucial thing is that culture is no longer meant to endure. It is the rapid progression of technology that condemns culture to being the opposite of what it has always been; now it is the immediate consumption of a technological product without substance. As Baudrillard rightly notes, there is ultimately no difference between mass culture (which devises contents) and avant-garde creation (which manipulates forms). Both are determined by the functional imperative of technology that everything must always be up to date. Once again, the point here is not to evaluate what is good, but to establish that the very fact of technology has wrought a transformation, far more than a modification, in the cultural whole. This is not what the French traditionally refer to as "culture générale" (general education); but rather what is covered by the term general culture in English. We can cite several examples. Thus, the fact–probably essential in this area–is the transformation of a hierarchical society into an egalitarian one. Traditional society, all traditional societies, are hierarchical. And when L. Dumont labels man Homo hierarchicus, he is designating a characteristic that is at least as essential as that of Homo faber. There have

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never been any egalitarian societies, and hierarchy was part of the generalcultural universe. Only a few ineffective utopians could pretend to build an egalitarian society. But, contrary to what moderns may believe, they were not expressing any basic popular demand. The rare egalitarian movements (the Levellers, for instance), envisioned no real equality, but rather a conquest of power for themselves! Since the eighteenth century, not only has the idea of equality become general, but, even more, it is taken as an established fact, and its realization seems possible. And all this is a direct result of technological growth. Technology cannot put up with irrational discriminations or social structures based on beliefs.7 All inequality, all discrimination (e.g., racial), all particularism, are condemned by technology, for it reduces everything to commensurable and rational factors. A complete statistical equality for any adequate dimension and any identifiable group such is the goal of a society having technology as its chief factor. And this corresponds to the process of specialization. If everything is specialized, if all specialties are equally technological, equally necessary from a technological point of view, how could we help but have equality? In fact, we can resolutely say that the demand for equality (as found in Marx, for instance) is nothing but the ideological product of the unlimited use of technology. A further "cultural value" was likewise greatly modified by technology: to wit, property. Despite Marxist orthodoxy, which is once again forced to deny reality, we can certify a change in property. The fact that the organization is now the main condition of production has transformed the nature of wealth and private property. "Organizations" do not belong to the "capitalist.” What used to constitute property has split up into several things: the rights of stockholders to share in profits; the management's power to establish guidelines; the rights of employees to status and security; the right of government regulation, etc. New forms of wealth have replaced what used to be "capital": a job, retirement rights, a management or concession license, social security, hospitalization under a doctor's care. Those are the new forms of wealth representing relations to organizations. What counts is not so much the money that an individual possesses, but rather the money that he can spend. And this depends on his technological capacity and his "status.” He is an engineer at Renault, a doctor of political economy, etc., so that status unites the condition of people in a socialist and in a capitalist society. Property is transformed into relations. Such is the new property based on the "technological capacity," which guarantees

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status. The link attaching present-day man to this status is as strong as the one that used to attach man to property. And consequently, decisions are made not by those who have the capital, but by a combination of those who have the status relating to a decision. It is to this degree that joint management by all participants is sure to come about, but that, conversely, self-management by the workers at the bottom is a dangerous utopia! Finally, in this quick survey of the well-known changes brought on by technology, we have to cite the one that has been most studied: the change in work. It is obvious that this is where technology began its general modification of society. It is also what appeared as most immediately evident. The reader can therefore consult the many investigations of this subject during the past half-century. We shall merely add two new remarks. First of all, as we have already said, observers habitually declare that a modern man has to be ready, because of the technologies, to “change his profession two or three times" in his life. But according to Montmollin's very judicious comment: There are no more professions, there are only jobs or activities. ”It is wrong to say that nowadays a worker has to change trades two or three times during his life. He does not change his trade, he does not have one. He therefore has to keep readjusting almost permanently. The most important measure to be taken in 1980 in the retraining of workers is to abolish the very idea of retraining. We would have to be so accustomed to training in industry that we should not think in terms of training and retraining, but only of training and more training."8 However, contrary to what is often asserted, work is far from having lost its "laboriousness" because of technology. Quite the opposite. It seems that even after the era of the machine (whose effects on man are common knowledge) work has actually become even more laborious, more draining than before. The transition to fully automated work, to the push-button factory, is still rare and slow. And this is not due to capitalism; the rate is no faster in socialist countries. It is not profit-seeking that blocks this development but the gigantic change demanded by automation, and it is not easy to put through in all areas. In reality, for most workers, technological growth brings harder and more exhausting work (speeds, for instance, demanded not by the capitalist but by technology and the service owed to the machine). We are intoxicated with the idea of leisure and universal automation. But for a long time, we will be stuck with work, we will be wasted and

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alienated. Alienation, though, is no longer capitalistic, it is now technological. On all these points,9 all observers agree that an immense transformation has been wrought by technology alone. In other words, the entirety of human relations, both interindividual and overall, has been modified. How, then, can we fail to believe that technology is really the "determining factor"? *** In this survey, we cannot omit citing the role of the computer–without overestimating it and, above all, without assuming that it now applies to everything or that all its potentials will be realized. Nevertheless, we must emphasize to what extent this area of technology can be determining. One technology, writing and printing, gave birth to a civilization. Another technology, namely television, has, as Marshall MacLuhan shows, changed the field of the brain. Still another, the computer, has carried us from the civilization of experience to the civilization of knowledge. Printing allowed the gigantic accumulation of a mass of information that was mostly unusable because it could not be grasped by individual intelligence. Printing gave us an excellent collective memory but the individual memory was not up to its mark; the information of the collective memory was dormant. The computer is now the relay between that collective memory and its utilization by man. The electronic brain plays the role of the individual memory and makes the acquired information usable. At the same time, it was correctly pointed out (by R. Lattès) that, hitherto, man devoted all his efforts to solving the problems that came up or else he posed problems that, as he knew in advance, the human brain could solve (a highly limited number of variables). Now, the computer lets us pass to the stage of reflecting on problems, with the possibility of posing them as complexly as we like. And we must note the strange feature of "coincidences": the computer "appeared" when information (stored, written) became unusable. This reflection on the problems has, let us say, existed for half a century already. I am quite familiar with it in historiography, for instance. Writing history is no longer the result of archival research but an elaboration of more and more complex problems. And the

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"appearance" of the computer corresponds exactly to that reflection which has no way out. The computer is not exactly the creative factor of newness; it is itself the novelty allowing creation to concretize. Hence, it is the determining factor on a collective and concrete level. With the computer, knowledge becomes a force of production, a decisive power in politics, though to the degree that all the economic and technological factors cohere in a rationally grasped whole. The computer faces us squarely with the contradiction already announced throughout the technological movement and brought to its complete rigor–between the rational (problems posed because of the computer and the answers given) and the irrational (human attitudes and tendencies). The computer glaringly exposes anything irrational in a human decision, showing that a choice considered reasonable is actually emotional. It does not follow that this is translation into an absolute rationality; but plainly, this conflict introduces man into a cultural universe that is different from anything he has ever known before. Man's central, his–I might say– metaphysical problem is no longer the existence of God and his own existence in terms of that sacred mystery. The problem is now the conflict between that absolute rationality and what has hitherto constituted his person. That is the pivot of all present-day reflection, and, for a long time, it will remain the only philosophical issue. In this way, the computer is nothing but, and nothing more than, technology. Yet it performs what was virtually the action of the technological whole, it brings it to its bare perfection; it makes it obvious. Technology contained in itself that complete transformation of the relationship to reality. Baudrillard (La Société de consommation) did an excellent job of showing this. It is remarkable to think that technology, which is often accused of "materializing" man, of chaining him to the material environment (and which does indeed center everything on activity in the material), derealizes everything, transforms everything into a "sign-of-nothing-to-consume. . . . Nature has been rediscovered in the guise of a rustic sample, framed by the immense urban tissue, gridded and honeycombed in the form of open spaces, nature preserves, or as backdrops to weekend cottages. This rediscovery is actually a recycling of nature. That is to say, nature is no longer an original, specific presence, in symbolic opposition to the culture, but a model of simulation, a digest of signs of nature put back into circulation.” Moreover: "The closer one gets to the document of

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truth, to the direct experience, the more one hunts down reality with color, relief, etc., the more the real absence of the world looms from technological perfection to technological perfection." Technology, as a mediator and as the new environment, makes every reality other than itself abstract, remote, and devoid of content. In this gigantic transformation, how can we help but attribute once again the role of determining factor to technology?

1 This corresponds fairly to what Habermas calls the "preponderance" in a society (Technik und Wissenschaft als Ideologie, 1968). 2 De Lauwe's study, published in 1966, coincides quite remarkably with Raymond Aron's study published in Progress and Disillusion (1969). Aron shows that the technological phenomenon is definitely the determining factor for the development of contradictory situations: on the one hand, the formation of new hierarchies, ruling categories; and on the other hand, the ideology of equality; on the one hand, the socialization of the individual consciousness (with the fear that the individual may vanish in the mass); and on the other hand, the ideology of personal autonomy (with the fear that the individual may lose his identity in solitude). One could truly multiply the examples of these contradictory phenomena resulting from technology, which Aron traces back to the dialectics of equality, of socialization, and of universality. Furthermore, one of the clearest and most demonstrative works about the primacy of the technological factor over all other factors, including economic ones, is P. Ferraro's, Progresso tecnico contro suiluppo economico? (1968). 3 Recent studies go so far as to doubt the growth of the central government's power, which has been dispersed to powers outside the state's jurisdiction. See, for example, Gremion, Les Pouvoirs périphériques. 4 Sec Hamon, Acteurs et données de l'histoire, vol. 1 (1970). 5 M. de Montmollin, Les Psychopitres (1972). 6 Hartung, Les Enfants de la promesse (1972). 7 John Boli-Bennet, Technization (1973). 8 Seymour, quoted by Montmollin. 9 See also the collective work, Civilisation et humanisme (1969).

4 TECHNOLOGY AS A SYSTEM GENERAL IDEA Today, numerous conceptions of "system" exist.1 Most authors start with the object to be studied and define the system in terms of that object. Deutsch (quoted by Hamon) calls a system "an ensemble of parts or subsystems which interact in such a way that the components tend to change slowly enough to be provisionally treated as constants. These slowly changing parts can be called structures—if the exchanges occurring in their mutual relationships prove to be oriented towards maintaining or reproducing systems, they can be called functions.” Hamon specifies a set of rational elements, whose evolution is characterized mainly by feedback. But he points out that this is the feedback of the whole on the parts, which assures the autonomy of the system in the whole of reality. Thus, the system is not a collection of objects placed side by side, nor a nonspecific aggregate. Many authors overlabor "feedback" as the true "key" to the system. In contrast, Henri Lefebvre stresses only the difference between the whole and the sum of the parts: "A system is a set of relationships that adds something to the sum of the diverse elements. That is why we can speak of the principle of the isomorphism of the system. Very different elements can have homologous energy laws; in other words, a system is a totality having its own laws of structure. And in this way, aggregates always appear as subordinates." However, Lefebvre draws the contestable idea that a system evolves purely in terms of its own internal logic. And for Meadows (in The Rome Report): "The structure of any system—i.e. the relations between elements, numerous, forming interlocking loops,

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and sometimes with effects that are staggered in time—is as important in the evolution of the system as the nature of each individual element making it up." Finally, there is Talcott Parsons's definition (The Social System, 1951): Two or more entities make up a system if they are linked in such a way that a change of state in the first is followed by a change of state in the other(s), which, in turn, is followed by a new change in the first. This definition certainly characterizes an aspect of the technological system, but it is really too vague. In any case, the facet of Parsons's thinking that applies especially well to the technological system is the idea that a system is inevitably both integrating and integrated (or rather a "structural organization of the interaction between units"). It involves a model, an equilibrium, a system of control. I would like to single out several features in Parsons. The system is a set of elements interrelating in such a way that any evolution of one triggers a revolution of the whole, and any modification of the whole has repercussions on each element. Thus, quite plainly, we are by no means dealing with isolated objects, but rather with a network of interrelations. It is also obvious that the factors making up the system are not identical in nature. There are, for instance, quantitative and nonquantitative elements. Finally, it is certain that the individual factors do not all change at the same rate; the system has its specific process and speed of change in relation to the parts. Just as it has its special laws of development and transformation. The second feature that I would like to emphasize is the following: The elements composing the system have a sort of preferential disposition to combine among themselves rather than with outside factors. The economic system implies a preferential relationship, which involves both a tendency to change for internal reasons and a resistance to external influences. The third feature is obviously that a system able to be grasped at a moment of its composition is nevertheless dynamic. The interrelations between the parts are not of the same type as those between the parts of an engine, which do act upon one another and in terms of one another, but always keep repeating the same action. In a system, the acting factors modify the other elements, and the action is not repetitive but constantly innovative. The interrelations create an evolution. The system never coagulates—albeit remaining a system and recognizably System X, even after many evolutions. The fourth feature is that a system existing as a totality can enter into relationships with other systems, other totalities.

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Finally, it is common knowledge that one of the essential traits of a system is the feedback, or rather the "feedback structures,” which do not, however, make up the system itself A system is thus characterized by two elements. On the one hand, the interrelations between the principle and significant elements of the whole (which, incidentally, can thus never be tested, all things being equal); on the other hand, its organic relationship to the outside: a system in the social sciences is necessarily open. It can never be considered in itself to the exclusion of any other relationship. If I choose the term "system" to describe technology in present-day society, it is certainly not because the word is fashionable now, but because I feel that it fits technology. It is an indispensable tool for understanding what is meant by "technology," while disregarding the spectacular, the curious, the epiphenomena that make observation impossible. Take medicine. Once (especially in the past) doctors described ideal models of diseases, but each concrete case of typhus did not show all the hallmarks listed in books as belonging to the abstract disease and ending with paroxysm and death. Yet if the physician had not had that schema of the abstract disease, which was obtained by eliminating all secondary elements of chance, he would never have been able to tell that a set of symptoms corresponded to typhus. The system thus involves a choice of symptoms, factors, an analysis of their relationships. But this is not a mere intellectual construction. There is quite definitely such a thing as a system-just as there was a disease expressed in a correlation between the systems that could be grouped and labeled. Technology has now become so specific that we have to consider it in itself and as a system.2 By speaking of the technological system, I propose to take account of an important part of reality. This is no simple hypothesis of an aleatory development; I am not extrapolating from a curve while singling out quantitative data from the past in a particular sector. At the moment, technology, in its qualitative and quantitative aspects, has developed in such a way that we can conceive its “normal" development. There is a logic which makes the system. Consequently, I propose to take reality into account by analyzing this system and its evolution. But obviously, I cannot do so with full certainty, for the technological system is not completed. It is not closed, it is not a system evolving by its own unique internal logic. Thus, it includes not only a large margin of chance but also a large

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portion of probability. It is no use forecasting technological "inventions" (in 1990, we'll have this and that, etc.), for prophecies can be made only after an overall study of the system as such, not by totting up countless innovations and applications. Finally, to the extent that it is not "repetitive," the technological system, while giving us only one case to study, is more difficult than physical, ecological systems, etc., which have repeated cycles that can be observed.3 The technological system is formed by the existence of the technological phenomenon and by technological advance. I am using "technological phenomenon" in the sense that I gave it in The Technological Society, distinguishing it from technological operation, which has always existed throughout history.4 The technological phenomenon has been specific to Western civilization It is characterized by consciousness, since the eighteenth century.5 criticalness, rationality.6 I will not come back to that. But the technological phenomenon does not suffice per se to make up the system; in fact, it can be regarded as essentially static. One may be tempted to take the phenomenon as such, and, that being the case, to consider and analyze it.7 In so doing, one would not only be making the habitual error of this kind of "cut" at a given moment. One would also miss the system itself, which, as a system, is evolutionary. But I have to make myself clear. I do not mean that objects or the technological system are evolving. That goes without saying. It is an obvious fact, and it does not add anything. Everyone knows that the automobiles of 1970 are not those of 1930. But that does not make the technological object or, more generally, the phenomenon any different from any pebble. We have said that the technological system is made up of the phenomenon and of progression. The latter is not the modification or evolution of the object. Yet we are always tempted to think it is those things. "Everything flows," time goes by; hence, the object changes. One might almost say that evolution depends on that passing of time, a kind of force exterior to the object, a river bathing it and carrying it away. But with technology, we are dealing with a totally different reality. For it is technology that works its own change. It has what Jouvenel calls "a permanent revolution of processes.” Progression is a part of the object itself; it is constitutive to the object. As we have said, there is no technology without progression. Technological progress is not evolving technology, it is not technological objects that change because they are improved, it is not an adding

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up of influences on those machines or those organizations that impels them to adjust. Technology has as a specific given, the feature that it requires its own transformation for itself. From the very instant that it existed in its modern reality, it produced the phenomenon of progression. The progress with which we are imbued and whose ideology inspires all our judgments is a direct result of technology. It is not "technology progressing," it is a new and independent reality; it is the conjunction of the technological phenomenon and technological progress that constitutes the technological system. Hence, there are traits, regulations, "laws" (if one can still phrase it thus) in both. Technological progress takes place in a certain way and offers peculiarities distinguishing it from other types of evolution. Economic growth or cultural development does not happen along the same lines as technological progression. Therefore, the technological system is characterized by a set of specific traits that distinguish it from other verifiable systems.8 As for the singularity of this system, it reveals itself in the very circumstance that a technological factor always preferentially joins with another technological factor. An "attraction" exists between them, and it is clearly due not to the "nature" of either factor but to their belonging to the same system. Hence, the associations with external factors, depending on other systems-political, economic, ideological-are certainly not excluded, but they are always secondary. Of course, in employing the word system, I do not mean that technology is alien to the other environments-political, economic, etc. Technology is not a closed system. But it is a system in that each technological factor (a certain machine, for instance), is first linked to, connected with, dependent on, the ensemble of other technological factors before it relates to nontechnological elements. Or rather, to the extent that technology has become an environment, each technological factor is situated in that environment and constitutes it by subsisting on it. There is a system just as one can say that cancer is a system. There is a similar mode of action in all the points at which the cancer manifests itself in the organism; there is a proliferation of a new tissue in regard to the old tissue, and there is a relationship between the metastases. A cancer within another living system is itself an organism-but incapable of surviving on its own. The same holds true for the technological system. On the one side, it can appear, develop, exist only to the extent that it integrates into a

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social body existing apart from it. One cannot conceive of technology like "nature," as able to live on its own. Social nature is preexistent to the technological system, which finds its integration, its possibilities, its support in social nature. Yet on the other side, the growth of technology does not leave the social body intact, nor does it allow its various elements to develop by and of themselves. For instance, there is no family per se, which, thanks to technology, would change as a family and find a new familial equilibrium. In reality, the technological impact challenges the totality of the family as a fact, the family is no longer a sociological reality attached to the body social in order to depend above all on the technological system. The family has now become the "family-in-the-technological-environment."9 What is more, each technological factor is not first bound up with some group, some economic or social phenomenon; it is primarily integrated into the technological system. Hence, the mechanization of office work. The current idea is that the government/administration/offices complex remains dominant; and technology is integrating into it. An extra technological element is added to the bureaucratic organization, integrated into the administrative mechanism and attached to this activity. Such a view of things obviously leads to regarding technology as put together out of disparate bits and pieces, with random and uncertain relations between them. Yet the opposite is true. Each technological element is associated with all the others preferentially. And when mechanization is introduced into offices, it is a kind of spearhead launched in that direction by the technological system. Administration is then modified; above all, it loses its determining character, and is now determined by the new apparatus. Unity is achieved not so much in the earlier framework (government/administration), but by means of the correlations between the diverse technologies. Thus there are no scattered technological factors, integrated into various social, political, economic contexts, which have their organizational principles, their unity, etc. Quite the reverse. There is a technological system having various modalities of intervention and attaching to itself every fragment of the human or social reality, which operation, moreover, removes that fragment from the tissue it was a part of. Hence, every technological factor, associated with the others, forms a more or less coherent and doubtlessly rigorous whole (the coherence is internal but not necessarily evident).

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DEFINING THE SYSTEM We will have to show at length in what way technology is a system and how that system functions; but in this paragraph, we can offer a general justification of this undertaking. Total technization occurs when every aspect of human life is subjected to control and manipulation, to experimentation and observation, so that a demonstrable efficiency is achieved everywhere.10 The system is revealed in the change (a technological, social change, mobility, adjustment, etc., a necessary change for continuously solving the problems raised more and more swiftly by the very existence of technology), owing to the interdependence of all the components, owing to the totality and, finally, the stability attained. This last point is particularly essential. "Detechnicization" is impossible. The scope of the system is such that we cannot hope to go back. If we attempted a detechnicization, we would be like primitive forest-dwellers setting fire to their native environment. These four traits of technology offer a first glimpse of what may be called the system from an overall vantage point. However, Simondon has shown that the technological object requires a separate treatment to be understood and for the whole to be grasped. The problem posed by Simondon, namely the specific knowledge of the technological object, shows that there is a system from which that object cannot be divorced. The technological object must be taken in the totality of its relations and genetically. According to Simondon, the mode of existence of technological objects is definite because it proceeds from a genesis. But this genesis creates not only objects. It creates, first, a "technological reality," then a general technicity: It is the ensemble, the interconnection [of technologies] that makes this both natural and human polytechnical universe. . . . In existence, for the natural world and for the human world, the technologies are not separated. However, for technological thinking, they are virtually separated, because there does not exist a thinking developed highly enough to permit theorizing about this technical network of concrete ensembles. . . . Beyond technical determinations and norms, we would have to discover polytechnical and technological determinations and norms. There exists a world of the plurality of technologies, with its own peculiar structures. Simondon considers this the true task of philosophy. It strikes us that the philosopher (in general, for Simondon manages to demonstrate the opposite) is rather ill-equipped to proceed toward this

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discovery. In reality, the discovery would be of an artificial universe to be taken on its own terms, in its own specificity. "The technological object, becoming detachable, can be grouped with other technological objects according to such and such an arrangement: the technological world offers an indefinite availability of groupings and connections. . . . Constructing a technological object means preparing an availability: the industrial grouping is not the only one to be realized with technological objects-we can also realize nonproductive groupings, whose goal is to attach man to nature through a regulated concatenation of organized mediations, to create a coupling between human thought and nature. The technological world intervenes here as a system of convertibility." Thus, this technological system exists not only by its intrinsic relationship, but also because the objects to which the technologies are applied are systems themselves. "Nature," "Society.” Since "Nature" and "Society" have existed as systems (the ecosystem, for instance), technology, applied to separated, specified, differentiated aspects of the one and then of the other, has finally covered them in their entirety. But these parceling operations (the correspondence of a technology to, or the creation of a technological object for, a certain natural need, a certain natural challenge, had an interrelationship, owing not to their technological qualification at the outset, but to their application to systems. It was only gradually, with the acquisition of secondand third-degree technologies, that technology, constituted as a veritable continuous tissue, then as an environment, became, in turn, a system in itself, independent of its objects. At that moment, the technologies became coherent with respect to one another, they were organized in terms of one another. The elements, the technological factors, were not simply juxtaposed, they combined with one another. An ensemble was established: of "solidarities," connections, coordination among all the objects, methods, etc., of technology. We must, however, pinpoint something here. When I speak of a system, I do not mean that I am constructing a system intended for descriptive and operational analysis and based on simulation by a data-processing model. I could say that, to a certain extent, I am applying systemic analysis to a concrete ensemble. But rather, I believe I can establish that the technological phenomena have combined in such a way as to now present the characteristics of a truly existing system. The goal is not to formalize in terms of a computer processing but rather to establish a certain reality (by no means every reality), which allows setting up the theory.

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Indeed, one thing struck me very sharply. The formalized systems I investigated were all very weak conceptually and very poor in understanding facts, all of which rendered them utterly inadequate. The operations issuing thence, perfect as they may be on a mathematical level, therefore made little sense! It seems to me that the limit of application depends on the size of the object. I feel that this method is applicable to precise and relatively limited objects—an organization or an ensemble of organizations, with the study of the pertinent system of information and system of decision.11 But I feel just as strongly that this is impossible for an entire society, for Western economy as a whole, or, for, say, the general politics of Europe. At most, the formalization into a system here could best reveal what is not possible as interpretation. In this book, however, I tend far more to share Parsons's outlook in his The Social System. But we have to face a serious criticism. How can we deal with technology as though it had a kind of existence in itself? How can we analyze a technological system as a sort of clock running all by itself? Technology exists only because there are human beings participating in it, making it function, inventing, choosing. To claim we can examine technology without regarding the chance elements, the irregularities produced by man, means proceeding to an illegitimate and, moreover, impossible abstraction. The technological system is purely imaginary, we never see it. What we see, what we encounter, are men using the instruments. Ultimately, technology does not exist. There are products, there are machines, there are methods . . . But it is artificial to view them together. Lefebvre wants to show that there are plural technologies, diverse, mutually unrelated, and plural technological objects, scattered, dispersed, with very divergent finalities, and never concerning the same environments. There is thus a collection, an addition, but no system. I realize that by analyzing the technological system as an object in itself, without considering mankind or groups, I am going counter to one of the chief trends in present-day sociology. Weber is reproached for studying bureaucracy as a system, setting forth its traits and operating laws. His detractors point out that it is the officials, the clerks that count, and that, ultimately, no concrete investigation reveals any of the laws and principles forwarded by Weber. Instead, we find human relationships, actions and reactions of groups and individuals, "dysfunctions," choices, and initiatives.

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That, and nothing else, is the verifiable reality of an administration. That is man in relation to what is known as technology; it is he who, in the final analysis, is called upon to act and to choose. Even if there is a certain reality of technology, it is erroneous to claim we can analyze it by disregarding the human presence.12 And yet, although I am familiar with this objection and acknowledge its full accuracy, such an analysis is precisely what I have attempted here. And my reasons are twofold. First of all, to say that one "sees" only separate technological objects which do not form a system is (with all due respect) a limited attitude. When man, looking at the things of nature, finds only separate objects-clouds and grass, pebbles and water, etc.—all of them scattered and unrelated, one cannot call this a very satisfying intellectual position. We know that from his very origins, man has tried to establish a system of nature. He has striven for both a system of relations, and an explanatory system. He has often gone awry, with magical or metaphysical explanations and correspondences; but each time, one system replaced another, until he formulated a system of rational relationships that are called scientific. This is precisely the same labor that we have attempted here. We do not claim that our description of the technological system is scientific or decisive, but only that this is an indispensable first step, without which nothing can be done toward comprehending man's new universe. Furthermore, when omitting human dysfunctions, my attitude is simply that of the scientist who assumes "all things being equal," whereas we know very well that such a situation will never exist. Likewise, we know very well that in chemistry and physics, the analysis of a phenomenon must perforce disregard certain conditions. One comes to a law, but when one tries to experiment, the experiment never exactly supplies what was foreseen, because the disregarded factors are not absent in reality. Yet if researchers did not proceed in this way no science would be possible. To discern the phenomenon itself, to know its regularities, we have to detach it artificially from variables, hazards, accidental disturbances. If we realize that these variables are nevertheless always present in reality, we need only reintegrate them and consider, on the basis of the first analysis, the modifications thus occurring in the phenomenon. What is well known for the so-called exact sciences must also be applied to the social sciences. Marx's attitude toward political economy strikes me as exemplary. Those whom he called the

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economists (i.e., the "classic" ones, the liberals, the founders of economic science) had indeed disregarded the human factor. Marx did not say that they were wrong or that their analysis of economy was therefore inaccurate. On the contrary, he ceaselessly used their analysis, and he looked upon their results as scientifically correct. But he then asserted that it is impossible to leave out the human factor from the economic milieu, and that we must see what its reinsertion will bring about. Even more, he drew conclusions about the economic reality because it was possible to study it scientifically by eliminating the human factor; and he went on to a critique of political economy based on the very data supplied by the classical economists. Their previous work was indispensable. The same holds true for Weber and bureaucracy. The study of dysfunctions and the analysis of employee behavior is impossible without Weber's schematic construction. It would be wrong to say that bureaucracy is (exclusively) the system taken apart by Weber. But it is just as wrong to say that bureaucracy is (exclusively) an ensemble of human relations, pressures, interests, etc. These have meaning or even a possibility of existence only to the extent that this ensemble is situated in, and in terms of, this objective system. What would those human relations mean if one did not know in advance that they are integrated in an ensemble of regulations, examinations, hierarchies, jurisdictions that are objectively established and that one must first become familiar with and determine, before knowing what, in this context, is the reality experienced by human beings. One should not protest that there is no reality but what is experienced, that only the "accepted as," the "understood as" are what count, with nothing existing beyond that experience. This is certainly accurate. But for such an experience to exist, there must be a reality outside that experience. I refuse to get entangled in philosophical debate, I am only saying that the official can "experience" the civil service examination as . . . But the fact that the examination is laid down by a law giving it its reality, that there are rules of application, a designated jury, etc.-well, this ensemble exists, not so much prior to the experience, nor as the occasion of the experience, but by itself. Of course, it is experienced only through a series of personal or collective experiences and perceptions. But it cannot be reduced to that, for if these laws and rules did not exist, there would be no experiences or perceptions. And it is not useless to know what the object is. In other words, by studying the technological system, I appear to be disregarding man. But in fact, I am showing the canvas on which

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action, refusal, angst, approval, perception, etc., take place. And without knowing that canvas, I could not understand those experiences and perceptions. Thus, I propose to furnish not so much the reality as a certain given that is indispensable for knowing this reality. To be sure, these matters have no objective reality independent of man's experience; but what man experiences does not boil down to his subjectivity. We have to bear in mind the rules imposed upon him, the obstacles he comes up against, etc. It is only if I know the wording of the law that I can understand a specific interpretation, a specific behavior of obeying or flouting. Thus, in describing the system, I do not exclude the initiatives and choices of individuals, but only the possibility that everything boils down to them. I do not offer "what takes place," “what is," but what man modifies, accelerates, disturbs, etc. Nonetheless, there is a further error to be avoided here. We should not believe that if technology is considered in this way, it is an object, or that, in relation to technology, man is a subject. Yet that is what we hear all the time. After all, technology merely supplies things, and man does whatever he likes with them. Thus, everything depends on their good or bad use . . . Remarkably, moreover, the very same people declare that the technological system does not exist as such and that there are only technological objects. In point of fact, however, those objects are not scattered and unrelated, they are included in a system. Furthermore, man, who is to act upon this system, who is to use these technological objects, is not a man per se, an absolute subject either. He himself is incorporated in a technological society. We have to zero in on this current opinion. First of all, it belongs to the "man in the street," who, of course, does not perceive a technological ensemble; he thinks he is dealing with his car, his TV, his modern accounting register, the IBM machine, and the airplane. Separate elements, distinct uses, an absence of reflection on their coherence and continuity. But this attitude results just as much from specialization. Each sector develops independently of the others (in appearance). Each of us is immersed in a separate technological domain. Each man knows his professional technology, and only that. He is aware (theoretically) that other technologies exist side by side with his, but he does not see the inner coherence of the sectors, and he can dream about all those vast and free fields which are ruled by independence and imagination-his own field being that of rigor, efficiency, and enslavement. Last but

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not least, among intellectuals, this attitude results from a systematic refusal to consider this reality: If technology is truly a system, then freedom of thought is a mere decoy, man's sovereignty is threatened, etc.; and since this cannot be, then technology cannot possibly be a system. This panicky reflex dominates most intellectual judgments on the nonexistence of technology per se. It is really so convenient and so reassuring to consider only completely unrelated devices, objects, methods. One can then imagine sovereign man throning in this collection and acting upon it in full independence. All technological elements come from him, have no existence outside of him, and return to him; in short, man gives them their coherence. For there is great reluctance to admit that a specific organization of technology exists, relatively independent of man, a sort of schematizing of life by technology. This reluctance is manifest in the following: romantic reactions, (which explains a whole portion of modern literature); the intellectual impugnment of this possibility; and the elaboration of false concepts to account for our society, to attest that ultimately nothing has changed, man is still man, society is still society, nature is still nature. Society is still formally and substantially the same-i.e., nothing has essentially changed in two centuries. Of course, there is speed, urbanization, and so on, but . . . At bottom, those intellectuals maintain the image of an intact society (and an intact human being): a society whose structures are comparable to those of the past (not the same, to be sure), whose groups, culture, work are subject to the same principles and the same analyses (though we perceive the differences, to be sure). Society (the same old society) is thought of as consisting, still, of classes (with similar class relationships) and obeying the same old dialectics . . . In other words, there is a permanent reality undergoing surface modifications, the reality of man for some, the reality of society for others, the reality of classes; and this reality is joined by an ensemble of processes, objects, work methods, machines, which certainly change one or two aspects of the society, but ultimately integrate into it, add to it. This image recurs endlessly, even among the most "forward-looking" people-the image of a modern society, which, in short, is merely the traditional society plus technologies. Naturally, it is not put in that way, but the type of analysis presented shows that such is the (hidden) assumption. And that is exactly what Lefebvre assumes in the statement quoted above. It is very hard to accept that we live in a society having no

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common measure with earlier societies, and that the experiences and thoughts of our ancestors are no longer of any use to us. Far more interesting and attractive is the phenomenon known as rapid change", a term widely used in Christian studies, the World Council of Churches, etc. This notion is wrong-from two points of view. First of all, this term focuses on the rapidity of change in a previously known factor, e.g., the family. There is a state a, a state b, a state c of the family, and we are told that the present transition from state b to c is far swifter than the earlier transition from a to b. But this problem is quite secondary. The issue is much less the rapid evolution of old elements than the appearance of a structure and an ensemble of radically new functions. From a moral or humanist point of view, we must certainly deal with the concrete fate of the individuals and groups affected by rapid change. But so long as we consider the latter first, we doom ourselves to understanding nothing of that issue. We have to regard not so much the change of older frameworks as the appearance of a new environment, we have to highlight not so much the urban transformation as man's situation in the technological structures. The second aspect of the same error crops up when we consider the origin of the concept of rapid change, which results from a particularly strong impression of some striking event: "People produce more, people go faster, etc.” "Rapid change" concerns the spectacle aspect of our society. It implies that we do not stick to the purely factual event. On the contrary, the essential thing is to focus on the overall mutation resulting from the appearance of the technological system. The instant one actually grasps what that means, the sensational discoveries lose much of their interest. Walking on the moon is no longer an event, it is a reasonable and normal consequence of what already exists. We can then say that once the technological system becomes the structure of our society, we can no longer speak of "rapid change," but rather of normal, foreseeable, and almost unilinear consequences of the previous mutation. That is why we find it necessary to reject the concept of rapid change," which is a red herring. The technological system is a qualitatively different phenomenon from an addition of multiple technologies and objects. We cannot absolutely understand them if we consider them separately or isolate one field of action from technology; we have to study them inside of, and in terms of, the overall technological

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system. How could we evaluate the influence of rapid communications if we separate them from the methods of modern work, the forms of housing, the technologies of government and administration, the demands of production and distribution, etc.? The mere act of isolating one aspect completely falsifies the issue as a whole. To understand the technological phenomenon, to analyze its sociology, the first condition is to regard it as a whole, in its unity. So long as we look at the technologies separately, we can certainly study each one's formation, its specific methods, its particular influences; but that sheds no light for us on the society in which we live or on the reality of the technological milieu. We would therefore have a false view of not only the whole, but also every particular technology; for each one can be truly comprehended only in its relationship to the others. To what extent does that one technology spark the development of other technologies; to what extent is it based on other technologies, etc.? This is a decisive methodological problem. We have to study the technological system in itself; and it is only this approach that makes it possible to study the different technologies. That leads to rejecting what I will call "abstract empiricism" (already abundantly criticized by Sorokin and Mills): i.e., the attitude of abstracting one aspect, retaining only that, and sticking to the most immediate reality as the object of study, applying exact methods to it. Obviously, the mathematical method, statistics, surveys, can be useful only for limited and quite subordinate facets; and such an investigation should certainly be launched. But when it is done, we ought to know that it is neither the faithful report nor the exact interpretation of the whole, that it must not claim any privileged or preeminent explanatory position. If it is not part of an analysis of the overall reality, of a description of the general correlations, it will mislead anyone who trusts the results, for it lacks the essential: the interactions. *** Having said that, we can attempt a quick first view of this system by naming certain of its aspects. The first aspect of the system is obviously its specificity. Technologies are not comparable to anything else. That which is not a technology has no point in common with that which is. And they possess, among themselves, similar characteristics; one can find traits common to all technologies. But we have to go further. All

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the parts are correlated, a correlation accentuated by the technicizing of information. The consequences are twofold. First of all, one cannot modify a technology without causing repercussions and modifications in a huge number of other objects or methods. Secondly, the combinations of technologies produce technological effects, engendering new objects or new methods. And these combinations take place necessarily, inevitably. But beyond that, the technological world, like any system, has a certain tendency to regulate itself, i.e., to constitute an order of development and functioning which makes technology engender both its own accelerators and its own brakes. Nevertheless, as we shall see, this aspect is the most uncertain. The system thus seems highly independent of man (just as the natural environment used to be). This system exists basically not because a mechanical relationship has established itself between the different factors (by no means should we imagine the technological system like the different parts of a clockwork); but because we have a denser and denser ensemble of information relationships. We already know this on the level of our own interpretation. Information theory, which is all the rage nowadays, is an "interscientific technology . . . that allows us both to systematize scientific concepts and schematize diverse technologies.” Information theory is not a new science, nor a technology among technologies. It has developed because the technological system exists as a system by dint of the relationships of information. It is neither a chance thing nor a brilliant human discovery. It is a response to man's need to understand the new universe. Information theory is a mediating thought among the various technologies (but also among the various sciences, and between the sciences and the technologies). "It comes into play as a science of technologies and a technology of sciences." But if that is so, if information theory now appears to be a means of finally penetrating that system, then it is because information has done its share in structuring the system itself. The various technologies have unified into a system by dint of the information transmitted from one to another and utilized technologically in each sector. One can fittingly apply Norbert Wiener's statement (Cybernetics) to the technological system: "Just as the amount of information of a system measures its degree of organization, so too the entropy of a system measures its degree of disorganization." Once every technological object or method no longer had just the function of doing the exact task it was created for, but also acted as a transmitter of information; once every technological object or

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method started not only to function as such, but also to register the information transmitted by the whole technological environment (aside from what comes from the natural environment); and finally, once everyone took all that information into account-that was the point at which there was a system. It is not only the emergence of information theory which forces us to note this, but also the multiplication of devices transmitting information and of information technologies. The technological system has thus become a demander in these areas. The more technology develops, the further the labors of information increase as a condition of that development. Material output and the movements of physical objects have become less important than these nonmaterial activities. The information explosion was necessary for the creation of the system; it is not a mere accidental product of our capacity to produce information. The moment the system tends to organize itself, the demand for information becomes explicit; that is to say, a new informational sector appears, which is itself made up of technologies whose sole specific feature is to produce, transmit, and gather information. At present, ninety percent of this information is produced by technologies of action and intervention, and its purpose is to allow other technological sectors to improve or adjust. Thus, what we have is an intertechnological relationship, the emergence of an ensemble of mediations; and that is what constitutes technology into a system. It is not just a matter of (though this is important) communicating, and reading about, scientific discoveries, innovations, (the international grid of information that will integrate the present-day electronic data banks, for instance). Far more significant is the permanent relation, on a concrete, often very humble level, between everything that is performed and everything that could be performed in the neighboring operational areas. Scientific information has always been highly attractive and unsettling, but it is not the center of our world; it is the permanent movement of thousands of bits of operational data from one technological sector to another. Now this movement has been decisively facilitated by the appearance of computers. And it is in this context that we must ask about the new technological ensemble, thanks to which the technological system is completing the process of constituting itself. The importance of the computer is obviously tied to the fact that the further we advance, the more significant a part of our world information becomes (this is already a platitude). We are no longer

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a society dominated by the imperative of production; now, we are ruled by the transmission, circulation, reception, and interpretation of multiple information. And that is exactly how the system is completing its constitution. The parts are not coordinated or even connected with one another; they are not materially linked. But each part is a receiver of information, and the system is held together by the network of endlessly renewed information. What makes it flexible and ungraspable at a given moment is that one can never draw up any sort of "inventory of the system," because that would mean coagulating the information, hence negating the system itself.

*** The computer is an enigma. Not in its making or its usage, but because man appears incapable of foreseeing anything about the computer's influence on society and humanity. We have most likely never dealt with such an ambiguous apparatus, an instrument that seems to contain the best and the worst, and, above all, a device whose true potentials we are unable to scrutinize. Naturally, we know what a computer can be employed for directly. There is no need to run through its possible uses here. This is not part of our investigation. I will merely recall a few acknowledged facts. The machine does not do everything. Man must first: define the goal, the objective to be attained (on condition that it can be evaluated quantitatively); decide on a program to put into the machine's memory and translate the program into a language that the computer can understand; and gather the specific data of the problem to be solved. The machine performs the operations and presents the results, but it is man who decides what he will do with the results. The machine cannot (in theory-we will see the discussion below) surpass its own limits or take initiatives; it functions according to rules that are defined in advance. By using the computer, man, admittedly, can pass along inferior, automatic tasks (and it is inferred that he can therefore devote himself to the superior tasks of inventing, of conceiving programs). But we can stop here in this recollection of platitudes. Instantly, we are confronted with the apparently insoluble questions, and extreme controversy among researchers. And it is this division, in which I find it impossible to discern a reason for choosing one stance over another, that strikes me as attesting the true unknowability of the computer-on the simplest level. Will

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the computer cause unemployment? For some, this is indisputable, since whole job categories are going to be brutally displaced. One computer doing the work of fifty or a hundred men. But then again, building, maintaining, and programming these machines will require considerable manpower. A program taking only a few seconds to be answered will necessitate months of elaboration by a team of workers. But between those two outlooks, we are absolutely unable to arrive at any choice, for we have no concrete experience. One can merely put forward that all technological progress brings unemployment and some jobs to make up for it, although these new jobs will not be taken by the people who are thrown out of work. What does seem certain is that the computer will accentuate the predominance of technicians, highly qualified employees and the young—and it will make the skills of old and unretrainable employees useless at a faster and faster clip. Another insoluble problem crops up. Is the computer going to bring about centralization, or will it permit decentralization?13 The computer accelerates decision-making and modifies the areas of centralization and decentralization. The centralization of means, the coordination of decision-making power in one point, the coherence of decisions, which postulates centralization: the integrated processing allows analyzing the procedure of decision-making in its coherence. Storage procedures permit centralizing all the useful facts at one single point. Hence, one can perfectly visualize a single center of "political" power. The data banks award a decisive superiority to the group that runs them-it could discuss an economic plan drawn up by the authorities, on the basis of millions of facts that the group alone would know and that would be processed by computers that the group alone would possess. But in contrast, other authors state that the computer is a marvelous instrument for decentralizing. Open the data banks to everyone, and everyone will be able to discuss politics with means hitherto unknown. The centralization of decision-making is necessary only to the extent that coordination and impetus demand it. In all other cases, the centralization of data processing can combine with a decentralization of decision-making. Decentralization is not only possible but facilitated: the computer relieves the decentralized collectivities of all-absorbing tasks and increases their decision-making power by augmenting their means of information—data processing coordinates (and hence reinforces) the decentralized

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system, which, moreover, will soon be made necessary by the congestion of the center.14 The consoling thing in such a discussion is that once again we seem to be dealing in everything and for everything, with a simple orientation of man himself. Hence, whether the data banks are opened up for everyone or kept shut and reserved for only a few is a simple matter of human decision. If man wants, the data-processing system can be an instrument of dictatorship or democracy. Alas, as we shall see, it is not all that simple. Let us discuss one final question, the most central, and apparently insoluble: the limits of the computer, or even the total replacement of man. Will the computer remain a simple inert instrument, which man can do with as he pleases, or will the robot seize its autonomy and replace man? This would be an evolution which Leroi Gourhan interprets as man creating endlessly outside of himself something that acts in his stead and thus makes human action useless. With the computer, we are reaching the final stage of that replacement; man's mind is becoming unnecessary. Technology is a process of exteriorizing human capacities. And the final step has been taken. Man is faced with another being capable of doing everything that man used to do, but with greater speed, accuracy, etc. The presentation in Rorvik's book is characteristic. Evolution, he says, passes from the amoeba to man through progressive animal mutations, then from man to the computer, which is simply a final stage of evolution. However, the computer must replace man as the "king of creation.” The machine is intelligent. There is no limit to its intelligence. And in visions that he wants to present as scientific, Rorvik describes all the possibilities of the computer: total automation of factories, the computer's aptitude for learning spontaneously, for programming itself; computers have personalities, they have mental crises, they feel friendship, dislike, affection, they can do very flexible tasks; they can create music or poetry, teach, deduce, direct a psychoanalysis, treat an illness. As for the machines that can translate, pass legal judgments, read and use any text, etc., Rorvik feels that they already exist. And in support of his opinion, he cites hundreds of statements by experts (without, however, giving any exact references)! Countless examples of such fantasies turn up in Elgozy (Le Désordinateur). This interpretation of the phenomenon is practically rubber-stamped by Beaune: "The machine lives and thinks."

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(He too envisages a close symbiosis between the computer and man, taking into account the computer's ultimate autonomy.) "The machine thoroughly explores the attributes characterizing those two functions. But it lives and thinks in its own fashion, filling the classical conceptual framework with new potentialities and autonomous meanings. . . . This affirms the power of a creative thinking of its own norms, literally establishing a new world full of noise and sense. . . . Human behavior, such as voluntary mobility, the mnemonic process, evaluating a random situation, are favorably simulated by those apparatuses . . . and mechanically explained. . . . These apparatuses no longer mimic life and thought, they actually live and think, faster and better than man in the silence of passions and feelings that . . . prevent us from living." It is clear that Beaune was deeply impressed by John von Neumann's celebrated opus, The General and Logical Theory of Automata in the World of Mathematics (IV, 1956), from which he quotes the part about the robot's ability to reproduce itself Neumann shows how a self-reproducing system can (theoretically!) exist. A reproduction that, moreover, would be totally lucid and self-aware, the opposite of biological reproduction, which always partially involves contingency. Neumann shows how, in the system he describes, an instruction will function as a father, the copying mechanism will perform the basic act of reproduction (duplication of genetic material), and one of the subsystems in the ensemble will even introduce arbitrary changes. Nevertheless, without going into an overall critique, I am obliged to state that throughout Neumann's description, there is a mysterious "one," who supplies programs, instructions, who puts automaton A in contact with automaton B, etc. In other words, so that the computer may be capable of a "self-reproduction," it must be programmed to that end. And thus, I do not see the idea of self-reproduction anywhere. But still, Beaune will not hesitate to speak of the "initiative" of the computer, of an artificial model of human thought, of an "electronic brain," which links up with Couffignal's "Machine à penser" (thinking machine). In regard to this entire trend, I would like to point out that all the works giving the computer the power of identifying with man, only better, and a sort of total possibility, are old (one exception, however, is W. Skyvington's Machina Sapiens, 1976). There are no recent works, aside from writings that are totally secondhand.15 Now it is well known that right up to about 1963, there was infatuation and enthusiasm among the specialists. Anything was

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possible thanks to the computer. For the last ten years, however, we have had a period of wavering criticism, uncertainty. It must be said that one cannot be sure of what is actually gained thanks to the computer. Some people assert that medical diagnosis is already being applied with success; others, on the contrary, maintain that all the present-day attempts are disappointing. The translating machine? It exists and is being used. But we are told by Elgozy, Vacca, and even Moles that it is a complete flop. The machine furnishes "translations" that are perfectly unintelligible, just as the teaching machines or chess-playing machines are still in the realm of fancy. As for demonstrating theorems, these theorems were all known; the computer has not advanced mathematics by even one jot. Regarding the possibility of having the computer "learn" autonomously and on the basis of its previous experience, it is, as Vacca says, a matter of definitions. One can program computers to react to signals from the outer world and to put those signals to their own use. The computer can work out statistics on the behavior of the surrounding milieu and, in terms of results, orient the apparatuses that are placed under its control. But there is no way that the computer can furnish an optimal reaction to events that were not foreseen by the programmer.16 Quite plainly, the tales about the computer feeling pleasure, affection, and what not are stupid. The word psychosis pops up when the machine goes out of order, and the word love when the machine responds better to its habitual programmer (who quite simply knows its possibilities better). Is there even a shadow of resemblance between the machine and the brain, between the mechanism and the mind? It is quite fundamental to realize first that the functioning of the human brain is essentially of a nonformal type.17 By a route which is in no wise comparable to thinking, the computer can achieve a certain number of results that man achieves with the mind; but in human thinking, there is always a share of surprise and unpredictability, which are inaccessible to the computer. Furthermore, the human world is not an exclusively rational world. It is just marvelous to hear someone peacefully declare that passions and feelings prevent us from living! I would rather not discuss it. However, for a still undetermined time, we are going to be creatures of passion, suffering, joy, hope, despair. Hence, the decisions we have to make cannot disregard that fact. They must include factors strictly inaccessible to the computer. Man must reach decisions, albeit with incomplete information; and

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even if he has complete information, he has to add irrational factors. To decide about a war, who can measure in advance a panic affecting an entire population and blocking the army, like France in 1940! A decision reached by man is never (not because of his incapacity, incompetence, inadequacy) the solution to a problem (which the computer is able to supply). A human decision is the breaking of a Gordian knot (which the computer is unable to do). The logical process is merely one part of decision-making, because the world in which a decision is to be integrated is itself not rational. Hence, one cannot imagine a perfection of the computer, which is able to do anything and ultimately will replace man. Likewise, Elgozy can accurately say that "the intrinsic feature of the human mind is not making calculations but knowing that it is making calculations and knowing what they signify.” And this is something the computer will never achieve! In these conditions, what is the true role of the computer outside the parcellary functions that are often described (gathering, storing, transmitting data) and the equally parcellary application areas? In reality, it is the computer that allows the technological system to definitively establish itself as a system. First of all, it is the computer that allows the large subsystems to organize. For example, the urban system can close itself up only because of the urban data banks (census results, building permits granted, housing already built or under construction, water, telephone, power, transportation, and other networks). Likewise, the air-communication system can function only due to computers, given the complexity, the very rapidly growing number of problems sparked by the multiplication of transportation combined with the technological progress in those areas (it is not only the oft-mentioned booking of seats, but also, for instance, the permanent relationship of each airplane, at every moment, to a huge number of control centers on the ground). The computer also makes possible the large accounting units, that is, the infrastructure for an unlimited growth of economic and even administrative organizations. Would it help to recall the importance of the computer as a memory for scientific work? It is the only solution for preventing the researcher and the intellectual from being swamped by documentation. The major part of a scientist's time goes for bibliographical research (the present world has over one hundred thousand purely bibliographical works, all listed in a second-degree bibliography, the World Bibliography of Bibliographies). In other words, it is the computer that

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will allow the scientific subsystem to finally organize itself efficiently by that very use as well as by registering discoveries, innovations, inventions, etc. And only the computer will permit adapting administrative subsystems, public utilities, businesses, etc. to the population growth. But of course, we must, in any event, remember that the computer can operate only on very great numbers. It is ridiculous using it largely, as is the case, for medium-sized businesses or for a small institute with a tiny staff of researchers. Most computers that I know of are underemployed by groups who fail to realize, as Font and Quiniou so well put it, that "the computer is a bulldozer, and using it to dig in a garden is inconceivable.” One has no grasp of what a computer really is if one thinks of it as doing a bookkeeper's job more swiftly. Sfez has clearly shown that, for example, the entire administrative system would have to be modified in terms of such equipment. In the administrative subsystem, it is a factor of knowledge and education (a demand that the administrators rigorously conceptualize the problems facing them), but it disturbs the relationships of authority. Politico-administrative decision-making changes its character. The programmer becomes the head of the administrative apparatus. The decision-maker is forced to enter into a dialogue and can no longer maintain his status on a legal and hierarchic basis. A total contradiction exists between the rigid status of the officials and the fluidity of the data-processing sector. The implementation personnel will tend to disappear. The supervisory personnel's task will consist of relations with the public, and forecasting or research. From a structural point of view, the computer transforms the administrative services from parallel to integrated administration. (For instance, the personnel salaries, previously taken care of by each ministry for its staff, will henceforth be administered by a single machine belonging to a separate and independent agency. Likewise, there will be an integrated administration of information for all agencies. Moreover, the computer is transforming the procedures and structures of administrative controls (by doing away with most of them). It is unifying procedures and concatenating administrative decisions with one another. But this perforce involves new powers of administration (the risk of knowing everything about all the individuals in a nation; each person will have his dossier containing all the information on him). Finally, computers allow us to organize subsystems by establishing

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connections and relations among the various parts of that whole. It is obvious that, hitherto, speaking about "administration” has been an intellectual abstraction. Concretely, there are, in fact, multiple administrations, mutually alien, competitive, guarding their secrets, etc. But this will no longer be possible with the computer. Either it will not be used; or, if it is used, people will have to connect the various networks of data and of preparation for administrative decision-making. The point is not so much to link them, as by a sort of interministerial committee, but rather to integrate them. Everything that we have just sketchily reviewed, and that was excellently analyzed by Sfez, shows that the computer has everywhere the function of integrating the parts of the technological subsystems. (For it can validly be employed only where human activities are technological; otherwise, the area is too vague. Naturally, one can get a computer to paint a picture, but, strictly speaking, this is of no interest aside from curiosity.) And when, like Moles, one puts the computer into the cultural sector, this either is folklore or signifies the total technicization of the cultural world and its transformation into a technological subsystem. (We will study this particular problem when we investigate art in the technological society.) The computer can process only technological data, for they are the only decipherable and the only profitable data. That is why it still has a long way to go before entering fully into pure scientific use (which is not profitable despite the celebrated formula of "research and development"). Nor can the computer enter profitable activities that cannot be reduced to technologies, because they would not be mathematizable. Hence, the computer operates in terms of, and for, subsystems that are technological or that it forces to become technological. There is no other possibility. Yet this integration is all the more powerful in that, naturally, the computer does not remain a solitary crag. The parallel advancement of the various communications technologies is obsolete. Data processing, television, telecommunications get together on more and more projects, which constitute veritable electronic systems of communication, associating audiovisual broadcasting- and- receiving devices, handling capacity, storage capacity and long-distance transmitting mechanisms. Instead of computers, television circuits, or telephone networks, we should henceforth speak of electronic communications systems. This specific organism is now the new

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relationship of the technological subsystems, and is allowed by the foundation of the technological system as a whole. But we should not give in to euphoria, as the Diebold Research Program says (1971). Far from simplifying technology or business, the computer has increased their complexity, forcing a series of constantly changing restraints upon researchers and managers. Integrating an ensemble into a smoothly working system turned out to be much harder than anyone thought or than the computer manufacturers themselves imagined. Thus, there are incredible difficulties, and no one even knows whether they can be overcome; incredible changes in all existing structures and procedures. So that, as Vacca perfectly emphasizes, "people often prefer sticking to the simplistic use of the computer, on the lowest level.” If the sequential project, the structure and the logic of the system in question have not been satisfactorily defined, if the problems raised by its possible congestion have not been studied, then no appreciable advantage is to be gained from using a computer. If one sets up a computer (and we have seen that this is nothing as yet) without first analyzing the system, one ultimately transfers the strategies and structures of the simplest possible system into the programs of the computer in order not to risk a large-scale failure: "Thus, there are systems in which a certain number of processes are run by a computer and which, for that reason alone, are considered modern and efficient, whereas they actually offer highly modest and uninteresting benefits," says Elgozy. Using a computer is not enough to make us modern. This leads to an essential discovery. It is utterly vain and futile to speak of the computer as a unity. We have just seen the necessary connection between the computer and telecommunications. But even more, the processes of swift calculating, memory dimension, etc., are quite uninteresting. To consider one computer is to stay on the mental level of the gawker at the county fair who goes to see the basket case or the bearded lady. The computer is not a gadget to do things better and faster. Computers are the correlation factor in the technological system. Until now, the large technological ensembles have had few interrelations. Twenty-five years ago, there was no way to speak of the technological system, because all that could be ascertained was a growth of technology is all areas of human activity. It was an anarchic growth, however; these areas were still kept specific by the traditional division of operations performed by man, and there was no relationship between them. People did look

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for the technological means to relate them, but they never managed to think of anything but an institutional-type organization, because they knew only of an institutional method to create procedures and connections among various agencies and separate areas of activity. Hence, what we had was a procedure of external framing and rigid "fastening"; and that was what kept the technological subsystems from developing in relation to one another. Data processing solves the problem. Thanks to the computer, there emerged a sort of internal systematics of the technological ensemble, expressing itself by, and operating on, the level of information. It is through reciprocal total and integrated information that the subsystems are coordinated. This is something that no man, no human group, no constitution was able to do. The further technicization advanced, the more the technological sectors tended to become independent, autonomous, and incoherent. Only the computer can deal with this. But it is quite obvious that it cannot be one computer. It has to be an ensemble of computers working interrelatedly at all communication points of the system. This ensemble becomes the subsystem of connections between the different technological subsystems. It is (without abusing the simile) like a nervous system of the technological ensemble-so long as we avoid any comparison to the composition or operation of the animal nervous system (there are so many cells in the animal brain and so many elements in an electronic storage-a perfectly stupid parallel). The simile works on the level of the fixed functions that are the same. The computer ensemble plays the part of a nervous system in the technological order; all other comparisons are uninteresting, they are childish outbursts or half-baked knowledge. However, the function we are dealing with is so purely technological that man is truly incompetent. Only the technically most perfect and most powerful apparatus could do the job. Thus, the computer performs a task inaccessible to man! And thus, there is no rivalry between them. The ideology that sees the robot as a servant or rebel, or the computer as ultimately replacing man in the evolution of creatures, is a bunch of fancies proving that the people who talk about the computer haven't the foggiest notion of what a computer is, and approach it through anthropomorphism. It is not enough to say that the computer can do this or that. All this talk is nonsense. The sole function of the data-processing ensemble is to allow a junction, a flexible, informal, purely technological, immediate,

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and universal junction of the technological subsystems. Hence, we have a new ensemble of new functions, from which man is excluded-not by competition, but because no one has so far performed those functions. This does not, of course, imply that the computer eludes man; but rather, a strictly nonhuman ensemble is establishing itself. When the parcellary technicization of tasks occurred, we gradually took on dimensions (e.g., of production) that required new organization. Man still knew how to manage that. Large-scale organization was made possible by the technologies of organization. But with the technicization of all activities and with the growth of all technologies, we are at present faced with a blockage, a state of disorder, because the things now taking place, in quantity, complexity, and speed, are no longer of a human dimension. No organization can operate satisfactorily anymore. The computer phenomenon has appeared at precisely this bottleneck. Yet so far, man has failed to see what this phenomenon demands or allows. It is the technological order, proceeding by more information and letting the technological subsystems adapt as a result of that information, which emanates from what has become the new environment. The ensemble of the operation takes place strictly above our heads, even if man programs a computer, and then another computer, and still another. For this is no longer where the problem lies. Either we are going to keep using computers as calculating machines, in which case we can say that they are useless, and all the criticism by Elgozy, Vacca, and Quiniou is accurate, and we can poke fun at those machines. Or else the technological system is powerful enough to impose that veritable and unique service of the data-processing complex; and we will then witness the concrete establishing of the technological system, as made possible by correlation and integration. A system in which we will see the internalization and reciprocal integration of technological functions, as well as the creation of a virtual universe (virtual because it is totally made up of communications), possessing its own dynamics. The technological system will then be complete. It is not complete as yet. But the complex of computers makes this possible. If one wishes to understand what the computer is (and not describe data-processing technologies, or list parcellary possibilities), then one can reach such understanding exclusively from that perspective. Hence, we have to examine the totality of data processing (and

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not one computer) in its relationship to the overall technological system (and not to man). Any other approach is superficial and condemns man to never understanding his own invention. In point of fact, the computer places us in a radically new situation, of which the seemingly magical applications of that apparatus can give us only a false idea. The computer creates a new reality. The transcription, the perfect transposition taking place through it will devalue any ascertainable reality-always uncertain, fragmentary, subjective-for the sake of an overall grasp, that is numerical, objective, synthesized, and imposes itself upon us as the only effective reality. Now this comes not only from the impressive efficiency of the apparatus, but also from our own gradually acquired disposition. For instance, we are getting more and more accustomed to the idea that what we consider reality (even tangible reality) is, in fact, nothing but the projection, on a cultural pattern, of a reality that we will never grasp in itself. Everything we know is the effect of a cultural training that makes us see or hear certain things, which, incidentally, have no objectivity. We are at present living in that uncertain universe. But along comes a rigorously objective and neutral organism and offers us a transposition which seems certain because it is mathematical. How can we help but believe that this image is resolutely true. The computer (even if programmed by someone in a definite culture) is not a tributary to our cultural clouds. And the other mental pole that helps us to enter this computer reality is, of course, our habit of translating the world in which we live into numbers, or even viewing it in terms that are infinitely huge (the galaxies) or infinitely small. It is probably the latter element that is the more decisive. When told that the wood we touch is made of empty spaces and atoms whirling at unbelievable speeds, when told that all our solid environment is actually menaced by antimatter, that energy and mass are interchangeable, we insert ourselves into an abstract universe, the reality surrounding us is neither meaningful nor assured, and all we can be certain about is numbers, for they at least are independent and autonomous. Hence, we are ready to lend reality to the universe manufactured by the computer, a universe that is both numerical, synthetic, nearly allinclusive, and indisputable. We are no longer capable of relativizing it; the view that the computer gives us of the world we are in strikes us as more true than the reality we live in. Over there,

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at least, we hold something indisputable and we refuse to see its purely fictive and figurative character. We will plunge into a new chasm if we start imagining that "somebody" could have falsified any of the data calculated by the computer, could have modified the program unbeknownst to us. Whatever the hazard, the result is deemed good. And how can we prove that the computer is wrong? For even if we point out one of those errors that can be easily made fun of, it does not challenge the overall fact that the numerical universe of the computer is gradually becoming the universe that is regarded as the reality we are integrated in.18 As for the mutation of reasoning, of man's thinking, a change which all this implies, I cannot now take up the specific conflict between image and word, which we will come to later. But I should perhaps note an interesting point. To the extent that there will be a more than complete integration between man and computer, we must understand that this integration will exclude dialectical thinking, dialectical reasoning, and dialectical apprehension of reality. The computer is fundamentally nondialectical, it is based on the exclusive principle of noncontradiction. With the binary system, a choice must be made, it is constantly yes or no. One cannot launch into a thinking that is evolutive and embraces opposites. Such thinking can, plainly, make use of the computer's data, but it is necessarily led by the computer to choices. And there is no maximum use of the computer; it will remain underemployed. If the instrument must be employed to its full capacity, then dialectical thinking becomes impossible. We have to admit that the computer is both Manichean, repetitive, and noncomprehensive. Now after prolonged dealings with this marvelous apparatus, how can we help but get involved again in that mode of thinking? Man is only all too spontaneously given to it! And dialectical thinking will be done away with by a complicity between man and the apparatus. *** Thus, the existence of the system considerably transforms the judgments we can make of the facts, the parcellary technological discoveries. Indeed, we are convinced that, when presented with a new factor, we are free to choose, to adopt or reject it. We try to appreciate the "pill," the car, the spaceship, marketing, video . . . And we note that each new element brought by technology could be an extra element of freedom (but also, of course, an element of

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dictatorship). What a constantly renewed choice! Unhappily, this choice is never offered, because each new technological element is merely one more brick in the entire edifice, a cog in a machine, coming just in time to perform a function never before carried out, to fill a space that, we now realize, was a gap. The system magnetically attracts that technological unity to come and make up the deficiency, and that attraction, in advance, gives that apparatus, that method, a clear, precise, exact, and limited function, from which it is impossible to depart. And in the face of that attraction, the scant freedom of man is neither far-reaching nor effective. Thus, it is perfectly futile to claim that when the computer is applied to the political dimension, it can become an organism of decentralizing, diffusing, of individual scaling of all information, of facilitating political controls. All that is a utopia, meant simply to reassure us and thereby allow the data-processing system to establish itself. We are dealing here with a factor of paramount importance. Man simply refuses to see the process, and by posing the question in metaphysical and absolute terms, he convinces himself that everything is still possible, that from the standpoint of Sirius, the new technological factor is liberating. Thus appeased, he then lets the mechanism progress, and afterwards, when he sees the result, he can say: "But that wasn't at all what we envisaged, anticipated, etc.” The harm is done. The optimism of the liberating pill or the democratizing computer is a mere operation of unintentional anesthetizing. If it weren't for a political system centralizing everywhere (including China!), if it weren't for the class of technicians holding power, if it weren't for a technological system arranged in a precise way, if, in other words, the computer appeared in a desert at point zero of a society, then it could be a factor of individual progress. But none of these conditions obtains. The computer has entered a perfectly oriented system. It will not, by itself, bring any democratizing or decentralizing; on the contrary, it will accentuate the opposite trends. Alan F. Westin (Privacy and Freedom, 1967) has perfectly analyzed the effects of the computer on freedom. The countless dossiers assembled by the individual bureaucracies for their own use can now be gathered in one central computer. All the information on each individual can be united, with a luxury of detail that we can scarcely picture (all legal infractions, all medical operations, all bank transactions, etc.). Confronted with this, people are suggesting legal regulation of

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the use of these files, legislation to respect privacy, etc. In other words, all they have come up with is a set of utterly antiquated defenses: the law-which was helpless against the authoritarian state. Moreover, these judicial means, provided by the administration, will be controlled by the state. That is, the only thing the protection of privacy will hinder is the interference by one individual in the life of another. But how can we believe that the authorities who control the apparatus and its use will themselves obey the same prohibition? They will always be in a position to decide whether or not to employ this gigantic system of control. Quis custodiet custodem? It has been proposed that the guardian be the people. But in that case, the central computer would have to be made available to individuals-who would then be able to use it against other individuals. There is no way out. There is no chance that judicial supervision of the computer can be useful. If the central government is honest, respectful of individuals, decentralizing, democratic, and above all, if it is not forced to defend itself (e.g., against revolutionaries), then we do not need any law. The government will not utilize this instrument of matchless power. Otherwise, the government will bypass the legal restrictions and enter the area of pure de facto interference. There is no protection. And the computer is moving in the direction already established by the ensemble of the system.19 In other words, this view of technology as a system leads to an essential conclusion. It is absolutely useless to regard one technology or one technological effect separately; it makes no sense at all. Anybody doing that has simply no understanding of what technology is all about, and he will find lots of cheap consolations. And that is the most common error I find in practically all writings on technology. The authors wonder if we can change the use of the automobile, or if TV has a bad effect, etc. But this is meaningless. Because TV, for instance, exists only in terms of a technological universe, as an indispensable distraction for people living in this universe and as an expression of this universe. It is not "raw" or “cultural" per se because it quite simply does not exist in and of itself! It is TV plus all the rest of the technological actions! To my knowledge, no author has escaped this convenient parcelling. And naturally, if one focuses on the harmful effects of some aspect of the system, one can easily demonstrate that we can overcome them and redirect the apparatus causing them. But those harmful effects do not exist per se! That is why all the "solutions" proposed by specialized books are anything but solutions.

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FEATURES OF THE SYSTEM The first feature-so obvious that we will not dwell on it-is that the system itself is composed of subsystems: rail, postal, telephone, and air systems, a production and distribution system for electric power, industrial processes of automated production, an urban system, a military defense system, etc. These subsystems were organized without long-term planning; they were organized, adapted, and modified step by step, in response to demands made by, e.g., the growth in size of these subsystems and the gradually emerging relationships to the other subsystems. Sometimes, people have tried to thoroughly reorganize such an ensemble from square one; but, it must be noted, such attempts work less and less because each ensemble is now tied up with, and conditioned by the others. Each one keeps losing its flexibility, as it turns out more and more to be a mere subsystem of the overall technological system. Nothing can be done about them spontaneously. These large subsystems have become so complex that everything has to pass through an analysis of the objectives, the structure, the flow of information from the ensemble. This analysis requires that the objectives be redefined in a formal and mathematizable way, that the logic of the ensemble be made clear (decisions on what must happen to each element in each situation it may go through during a process of complete functioning). In other words, we must establish what we would like to see happen in all the possible eventualities of every telephone call, every train, every aircraft, etc., and their history must be determined and controlled by the system. Once the functions of each subsystem have been defined in detail, we still have to define the structure (e.g., problems of centralization/decentralization) and the internal controls. We must therefore be cognizant that the technological system is neither abstract nor theoretical, it is merely the result of the interrelationship between these multiple subsystems, and it functions only to the extent that each of these subsystems functions and that their interrelationship is correct. If a short-circuit occurs among them, or if something goes wrong within any subsystem, then the entire ensemble is blocked. This is what leads Vacca to his theory on the fragility of the great technological ensembles. The second feature of the overall system is its flexibility. What we have just said would make it appear enormously rigid, and indeed, the imperatives are more and more numerous and demanding. But it seems that while this may be true for each subsystem, the

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ensemble per se tends to function more flexibly, and the strength and stability of technology reside in that ability to adapt. This is an apparent contradiction, resulting from different levels of analysis, which produces the conflict between the two interpretations. No doubt, M. Crozier is right when he maintains (The Stalled Society) that the great modern organizations seem to be evolving solely toward oppressiveness: "The constant improvement in forecasting methods allows a greater exercise of tolerance in the application of rules. The organization can operate with a lower degree of conformity. Knowledge permits limiting the constraint, since one can forecast without taking recourse to constraint in order to assure the accuracy of forecasts . . . etc.” But one can say that the better adapted man is, the more tolerant and liberal the system can act toward him. The more he conforms, the less constraint has to be used. Now the technological system produces more and more efficient mechanisms to bring about conformity. It can offer a huge measure of independence so long as human action does not challenge the system. The system tends to be more and more abstract and to establish itself at a second or third degree. Hence, the primary and superficial conformisms may disappear-man seems to acquire far greater freedom. He can listen to the music he likes, dress as he likes, take on completely aberrant religious beliefs or moral attitudes; none of these things challenge the technological system. The technologies even produce the means of these diversifications for man. But these diversifications exist only to the extent that the technologies function, and the latter function only to the extent that the technological system keeps improving. It is a mistake made by many thinkers, like Charles Reich or Onimus, to see increased liberty here20 or a challenge to the system by free behaviors or the emergence of a new phenomenon independent of technology. In reality, these motions of independence are strictly dependent; but technology leaves zones of indifference that keep getting wider as technology gets more self-assured. It is clear that social conformities are all the less apparently intense in that the technological conformities have become interiorized and are no longer obvious—for the social structure has become more technological. Conformity to technology is now the true social conformity. The technological system omits from its scope things that used to be the object of great concern by society (e.g., the identity of moral conducts). That is why we have to avoid posing the present-day problems in classical moral terms. For instance, to talk of liberty or

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responsibility in the technological system is meaningless. Those are moral terms that are incapable of taking man's actual situation into account. It is, however, true that the technological system appears to give man a larger choice of possibilities-but exclusively within this technological range, and on condition that the choices bear upon technological objects and that this independence employs the technological instruments, i.e., expresses approval. The flexibility we are discussing concerns not only the apparent independence of man; it is also, and quite concretely this time, a feature of the system with respect to the subsystems. The subsystems have an independence that often causes them to be considered in themselves, i.e., as having their own existence unrelated to technology, their own originality, hence origin, and their own laws of functioning with no reference to technology. This is held to be true of culture or religion or organization, etc., whereas all these things have become part of the technological system, with a very large flexibility in their relations. People who thus consider the autonomy of the subsystems have often made the mistake of finding (or hoping to find) a remedy for technology in those subsystems. I have shown elsewhere that organization is not a remedy for technology but a further step in building the technological system. For a good example of this seeming independence of subsystems, one can look at S. Charbonneau's study, "Régionalisme et société technicienne" (Cahiers du Boucau, 1973). Regionalist theories all have the same function: to refine or justify the reductive dynamics of differences. Regionalism is a product of the technological society, despite the contrary appearances, which make technology out to be always centralizing. Technology can also be decentralizing so long as the decentralized factor is more strongly integrated into the system itself. In this way, regionalism can be an aspect of technocracy, although presenting itself as an application of liberalism. That is why the discussion about and referendum on regionalism in France during these past few years have no importance whatsoever. The regional reform will be a seeming gain of autonomy, permitting greater technological strides. Such administration is more in keeping with technological growth than authoritarian centralism, which is now obsolete. The more complex and total the technological system gets, the more it has to be flexible (this is quite clear). A large number of disorders that we presently ascertain derive from rigidities in the system. No chaos is provoked by technology. There is still a rigid centralized organization, which

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can only cause incoherences, given the size. But, as we have seen, technology has the apparatus for allowing the flexibility of the whole— namely, the computer. The computer permits the shift from a formal and institutional organization to a relationship by means of information and the dynamic structure according to flows of information. Flexibility also allows keeping cultural diversities where centralization has not yet taken place. To be sure, there is still a Khmer or a Sahelian culture; those are survivals fully tolerated by technology, but classified by it as leftovers from the past, folklore, the living museum of the anthropologist. Those cultures are a semblance covering the reality of a ubiquitously similar technological system (but with different degrees of advancement). And when there is a risk of conflict, the local culture disappears-for example, in a war, when technology presents its most brutal and ruthless side. In general, however, technology is flexible enough to carefully adapt to local conditions. I have already shown this in my previous book. Hence, let us say that the cultural diversities bear witness to the flexibility of the system, but do not prove that the human realities are outside it. The same is true of time. Richta is perfectly correct in emphasizing that the basic feature of technological growth is the economy of time. It acts upon time, it produces time to the detriment-one I could say-of space. It creates time for man while reducing space. Hence the gratuitous and purely utopian character of Lefebvre's thesis that the important thing now is to create space. Heading in 'his direction, one can only go astray in the slough of unreal discourse. On the other hand, Richta sees clearly when he writes: "The economy of time is presumed to become the adequate economic form of the scientific and technological revolution at a certain degree of development" (Civilization at the Crossroads, 1969). And he tries to draw from this principle a new economic rationality, which differs from all the other types known. But the problem is that this economy of time cannot be ascertained in an industrialist system and is meaningless if it boils down to leisure. It makes sense only in respect to the technological system itself, i.e., as Richta shows, if the economized time ultimately serves for an improved training of men to work toward technological and scientific development in an integrated culture. A third feature, and an utterly essential one, is that the technological system itself elaborates its own processes of adaptation, compensation, and facilitation. Let us consider, in fact, that, speaking

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very generally, the processes of adaptation are technologies. Whenever technology creates, say, desperate social situations because of the complexity, the demands (which make countless young, old, and semi-capable people powerless and marginal, etc.), the free motion of technologies-it instantly establishes a social service, technologies of prevention, adaptation, readjustment, etc. These are actually technologies and hence represent the system, being meant to facilitate life in this inhuman universe. Thus, an ensemble of reparation technologies is formed.21 Because of these technologies, man can succeed in having a pleasant and livable life. But this is nothing more than substituting an artificial system and a technological fatefulness for the old natural system and the fatefulness of the gods. There is no retort, no original invention by man: In reality, the facilitation is always produced by technology itself it is technology that furnishes gadgets, television, travel, to make up for a colorless, adventureless, routine existence. Likewise, the mass production of wretched science-fiction books or movies like Alphaville, 2001, Fahrenheit 451 is a mechanism for adapting, for adjusting to the technological society as it really is. We are shown a horrible, unacceptable model, which we forcefully reject; but it is not technology, it is an imaginative treatment of what technology could be! And in our refusal, our rejection, our condemnation of this, we think we have waved off technology; hence, we must be lucid and vigilant beings, we are rid of our anxiety. Technology (this technology!) will not seize control of us. We are very cognizant, and we will not be gotten the better of. Now this facilitates the acceptance of real technology, which is neither wicked, visible, nor appalling, but utterly gentle and benign. Since technology is nothing like what it has been shown to be, it strikes us as perfectly acceptable and reassuring. We take refuge in the real technological society in order to escape the fiction that was presented as the true technology. This is why I am resolutely hostile to all these antitechnological novels and films. They are never anything but that old military trick: You simulate a massive attack, with trumpets and lights, so as to divert the attention of the men defending the citadel, while the real operation (digging up a mine, for instance) takes place somewhere else and in a very different way. Countless other adaptation processes appear, and we may say that the entire phenomenon of Charles Reich's Consciousness III is nothing but a method of adjusting to the new stage of the technological

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society. Consciousness II was adapting to the industrial technological society, Consciousness III to the technological society of the computer. Nothing more, because Consciousness III brings no reversal of the social process; on the contrary, it is bound up with the most modern production. Reich is ecstatic because engineers sport bell-bottoms and long hair. The important thing for me is that as engineers they are still doing their engineering work exactly as they did before, and, hence, they directly make this technological society continue and progress. The rest is childish, a pitiful affirmation of "personality." When faced with difficulties of human adjustment, the technological system produces satisfactions and compensations facilitating the growth and functioning of the system. Likewise, it now presents demands which can appear as possibilities for personality development. Crozier, in The Stalled Society, very accurately points out that, in order to cope with technological growth, there will have to be more invention, creation, nonconformity, and challenge. Creativity and nonconformity are fundamental values in the technological society; indeed, for its progress, this society requires not passiveness but an enthusiastic approval of change. It is technology that demands an assault on the old values, on morals and traditional ethics. The challenger opens the way for technological strides. Creativity is called upon, because whenever technology advances, forms of life that are possible in technology must be invented. But it is wrong to believe that there is true creativity (this relates only to technology), true nonconformity (it expresses merely a conformity to the deeper and stronger reality). When I speak of conformism and Crozier of nonconformism, we are simply not on the same level of analysis. It is certain that by progressing nonstop, technology challenges the old structures and values, and incites man to create whatever allows him to live in this environment. But this is never anything but conformity; and creativity will produce the countless gadgets. Those bell-bottoms so dear to the heart of Charles Reich are an essential product of this adaptable creativity. Likewise, an altruistic ideology will see the light of day (neo-Christianism for others, or the ideology of socialism with a human face). The more truly oppressive the system gets, the more man has to compensate by affirming his independence. The more destructive the system gets toward human relations, the more man has to aver himself an altruist-which Baudrillard is perfectly correct in labeling a "social lubrication.” Once this altruism leaves the verbal

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and institutionalized domain, it will itself become very quickly technicized. One should not view the technological system as manufacturing human robots. On the contrary, it develops those things on which we make our humanity most strongly dependent: diversity, altruism, nonconformity. But they are perfectly integrated into the system itself. That is to say, they function for the benefit of the system, supplying it with new nourishment and making one another materialize thanks to what the system furnishes. Thus, the need for play, which is discovered to be so fundamental to a human being, is put to use by the technological system. Man has a wonderful time playing with all the machines at his disposal-and this playing will be so much more exciting, because of technicity. Thus, similarly, the technological system has allowed man to rediscover the refined techniques of sexual play-which, however, are nothing but technologies. I realize I may be asked; "But if man can develop all his potentials through technology, what more do you want?” A tough question to answer. How can we point out that highly technicized sex is not love? That playing with complex or fascinating apparatuses is not equivalent to a child's playing with bits of wood? That the nature reconstituted by technology is not nature? That functionalized nonconformity is not existential? In other words, that all those things make us live in a universe of facticity, illusion, and make-believe. I always come back to the example of the Nazi soldier (at the start of the war). He was trained for individual initiative, for nonservility toward commanders, for the capacity to take over an enterprise himself, and he therefore seemed the opposite of the mechanized soldier, who is at his sergeant's beck and call. But this freedom existed only within the army (he was not free to desert!); it was meant to turn out better fighters, within the Nazi ideology, and it was achieved by extreme psychological manipulation. Such is the "creativity," the "nonconformity" of man inside the technological society. They are now necessary conditions for the development of the system; nothing more. The essential here has been said by B. Charbonneau (Le Chaos et le système): "The cog is the antithesis of the human person; the latter is a universe turned toward the Universe, the former an inert piece that only an outer force can situate in the ensemble." For we are not just dealing with man's absorption into technology. The system has been able to develop all the better in that technology has been assimilated by and to groups that have

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identified with it. People would have realized the danger more quickly if the professional organisms in charge of technologies had understood what was happening, if they had managed to "reflect" on what they were doing. In contrast, however, for reasons of both ideology (beliefs, etc.) and personal interest (success, money), they fully identified with technology. And it was even the strength of these groups of technicians that allowed the predominance of technology and its organization into a system. It was also the stranglehold of these groups on society that blocked the first intellectuals aware of the danger. I am thinking of the mathematician Cournot, who (in his Considérations sur la marche des idées et des événements dans les Temps Modernes, 1872) was probably the first to understand and expose the vast danger of not only mechanization but technology as well. A good deal later, Adams (The Degradation of Democratic Dogma, 1919) saw the consequences of technology with an extreme lucidity. The voices of these scientists were muffled by the existence of the “pressure group" of technicians and scientists-which Galbraith clarified in The New Industrial State; the group of technicians is perfectly integrated into the technological system and acts as a relay between technology and society. Kuhn took up and deepened these ideas for science by showing that science exists only because of a sociological group of scientists, who provide its tendency and its clarification, The identification of the scientist with science is accompanied by the identification of science with the scientist. And the defense of the technological system occurs when technology is defended by a social group that defends itself by defending technology, which is the group's raison d'être, justification, livelihood, its way of gaining prestige, etc. One of the compensatory processes is the development of language. It is absolutely essential to understand that in this proliferation of things that invade him because of technology, man reacts by throwing himself toward the verbal universe. And the word becomes all the more important as things become more overwhelming. We find the same verbal magianism in the past, when man was in the midst of a nature that he did not control. Holding the word that represented the thing was having power over the thing. Thus today, since he no longer controls the technological universe, man has abandoned his rationality and gone back to the magic of the word in the face of, and upon, the technological thing. But though the use may be the same, there has to be a difference because of context. Language has to take on an objectivity permitting it to

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correspond to the objectivity of the technological system (now this is certainly magianism, for verbal magic too was the objectivation of the formula so that it might act upon the objectivity of the natural environment). The "one," the "it," the field (all Lacanism, etc.) is purely and simply magianism-just as incidentally, the style of Lacan, and of so many other writers, is-very significantly-sheer incantation. It is a mechanical expression of the compensatory reaction by the technological system. But on the other hand, language must itself be integrated into the system in order to play its role. Hence, the structuralist studies of language, which are precisely characteristic of that technicization; hence, likewise, the trend toward viewing the text as an entity in itself, an object. And the orientation toward focusing on how one says something rather than on what one says, in order to demonstrate technologically. Here, Roland Barthes is very directly one of the reducers of language to its function of compensating for the technological system. The technological system produces its own compensations, it reproduces its conditions for existing and developing; the qualities of man are part of it. This is simply a way of removing an obstacle to development and reducing the contradictions. For the system obeys a law, the law of the indefinite evolution of technology. The system cannot stabilize (contrary to the image that certain people have of it); it includes within itself its own expansion. It is a permanently expanding system. But this expansion therefore keeps challenging both the adaptation of man (and of institutions and society-to which we will return) and the very structure of the system itself. However, technology is a flexible ensemble that tends to endlessly reproduce its own reorganization. Otherwise, it would not be technology. A bit like a doll with a lead base, you can push it down and rock it, but it always regains its balance, though in a different place from before. Thus, technology contains within itself its own processes of reorganization, for it is precisely a technological organization. Any challenge to, any disturbance in the system is nothing but a provocation, a solicitation to have new technologies, new organizations, new procedures established, each time integrating a larger amount of data (its quantity unlimited thanks to the computer). And this does not take place against man or to control or dominate him. The system has no intention and no objective. It merely rolls along. And its servants are quite convinced that they are working for the good of man. They are inspired by the best intentions. Which

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makes the technological system more and more humanized. But through the absorption of the human into technology. Any other process is unthinkable.22 THE ABSENCE OF FEEDBACK We have just said that technology produces, for man's benefit, compensations for harmful effects, that it produces facilitations for itself, and that it can change character (decentralization). Yet it appears more and more that this system does not have one of the characteristics generally regarded as essential for a system: feedback, i.e., the mechanism intervening when an ensemble, a system in movement, makes a mistake, and rectifying that error, but acting at the source, at the origin of the movement. There is no "reparation" of the mistake in its functioning; the movement is taken back to its origin, modifying a given in the system. Feedback exists not only in mechanical, artificial systems, but also in biological or ecological systems. It involves a checking of the results, followed by a rectification of the process when the checked results are injurious or unsatisfactory. Now the technological system does not tend to modify itself when it develops nuisances or obstructions, etc. This system is given to pure growth; hence it causes the increase of irrationalities. Also, it is clumsy and lacks fluidity. When disorders and irrationalities are noted, they bring nothing but compensatory processes. The system continues to develop along its own line. The rigidities themselves are very slow: not only by a mechanical effect as in population but also by the appearance of necessity in the technological operation. When we see that the housing built according to the most economical technological standards is disastrous from a sociological or psychological standpoint, we nevertheless go with the momentum, we cannot turn back. The same kind of housing has been put up for twenty years now because it is impossible to take the technological issue back to square one with the enormous complex of decisions, devices, etc. Likewise, when an operation is launched, it has to be pushed to its end, even when we realize how disastrous it is. On two very different levels, taken from among a thousand examples, the Concorde, and the garbage incinerating factory at Pau. In reality, for a system on so vast a scale to have a self-regulating behavior, its reactions would have to be based on a model of its relations with the environment which gives it continuous instructions.

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We find such a model in the traditional societies with, for instance, the view of the world accepted by all members of that society, its religion, its Weltanschauung, its traditional laws, etc. But the technological system does not have such a system because of its absolute domination over the environment. It evolves by its own logic, Yet we should not go so far as to believe that technology cannot resolve the difficulties it creates; we have to distinguish, as J. Boli-Bennet does, between microproblems and macroproblems. Here, by way of example, is his list: job-related difficulties (work, free time, unemployment), the subordination and “alienation" of workers (the transition from capitalism to socialism), pollution, population growth. Those are a certain number of problems caused by technology, and which it could probably solve (I will not join him in labeling them microproblems, for they are tremendous!). We shall see that technological progression is due to coping with those difficulties. And, to the extent that technology is also an ideology, it leads, as J. Habermas shows, to replacing purely practical issues with technological problems (but on condition that we take "practical" in Habermas's sense); the state, for instance, shifts from politics to administrative and technological management. However, there are other problems, which have no chance, no likelihood of a technological solution. Take for instance: the totalitarian character of the system, the indefinite complexification, the reconstitution of the destroyed human environment, the search for the quality of life, the tendency toward dislocation caused by the disappearance of qualitative controls, the reckoning of costs (the external economic costs), the denaturalization of man with the disappearance of natural rhythms, of spontaneity, of creativity, the incapacity for moral judgment because of power. Those are insoluble problems, because, in order to deal with them, it is not enough to overcome drawbacks, to remove a present-day difficulty, to find a way of counteracting a danger; we would have to be able to go back to the source of the technological process to modify the totality of the functioning and the organization. The first category of problems that impels the evolution and expansion of the system is a type that can be put in technological terms, in view of the now existing technologies. That is, these problems are solved in a linear fashion by the very progress of technology.23 It suffices to let the present combination of elements

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function in order to get answers to the questions more or less shortly. Whereas in the other cases, we have to make a "loop," i.e., double back to the source of the process in order to introduce new information there. But the difficulty is that we are working with the communication of external data. Once again, there is so much talk these days about communication, because in the technological system, communication is essential. We saw earlier that communication is what allows the system to establish itself as such; and now, an impossibility of communication prevents feedback. Feedback is never anything but a matter of communication, albeit the communication of external data. P. Kieff (Blueprint for Survival, p. 57) remarks that technology is devoid of internal regulations: "It is in its principle even an abolition of internal limits; if anything is possible, technology will do it. . . . Technology has no internal regulations that can organize inner life. It has nothing to do with inner life except to abolish it. Once reduced to an intellectual model equivalent to the technological model itself, the repression by the forces of technology will inevitably have a tyrannical character . . . the response would be the reconstitution of a deep-seated ethics, which would itself contain its own organs of command.” And Goldsmith (in the same book) makes the same statement: "The natural phenomena are capable of self-regulation, those that create technology ought to be regulated from the outside. . . . When one has used chemical fertilizers, one is doomed to continue, when one has undertaken to get rid of malaria with DDT, one is forced to keep using it year after year . . . if the cleanliness of our waterways depends on purification plants, etc., we are obliged to keep these installations running.” In other words, there is no internal control of results, no internal mechanism of regulation, for these results are felt on levels and in areas that are nontechnological. The technological system does not function in a void, but in a society and in a human and "natural" environment. Thus, there are two difficulties. One is to ascertain the qualitative effects of technology in those areas; but that is not in the province of technology. There is a whole set of phenomena that elude all measuring instruments and even the technological imagination itself. But on the other hand, once those phenomena are registered, they have to be reintroduced at the origin of the process. Now we have seen that the electronic complex could register a large amount of this data (but not all) and perform this work of reinserting new information. But the junction between the data-processing complex

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and the rest of the technological system does not come about by some kind of intrinsic growth, by some technological self-development. We are dealing here with an innovation in the technological system: this junction is possible only through human mediation. The computer cannot by itself enter into a relationship with such a sector of technology; it is man who must establish the connection. Of course, what I am saying will not surprise those who have stuck to the ancestral and antediluvian idea that technology is a tool, which man uses as he pleases. The entire technological drama at the moment is heading toward a situation in which technology, having conquered its autonomy and functioning by self-augmentation, could not, on the contrary, have feedback except by outer pressure. Feedback is made possible by the data-processing complex, but the relationship has to be mediated by a nontechnological element-which runs counter to autonomy and is perfectly unacceptable. It is not only the relationship that depends on man, it is also the reception of this data and its transformation into programs. Hence, the feedback of the technological system necessarily passes through the awareness of the major effects of technology, an awareness reached by man who is integrated in the system. Hence, it could not be enough for man to act with his good sentiments, his moral or humanist ideas, his political convictions, his principles.24 We cannot appeal to amenity or humility. All this presupposes that man can act directly on the consequences of technology. It is obvious that for those who believe that there are only isolated technological apparatuses, man being master of each, this whole problem of feedback is never raised. All man has to do is wish to change a certain use, and everything will docilely be modified. But we have seen that nothing can now justify this universal royal reign of man. It is not enough for man to have created an apparatus or to know everything about it in order for all the effects of the apparatus to be perfectly clear to him. We have passed into a phase of technological organization in which man should not interfere. But he cannot help interfering, because of that absence of internal regulations, due not to a deficiency in the technological system itself, but to the fact that it functions only by intro-information (data on itself) and never by extro-information. Thus, the true problems are on the inside of the system. That is the bottleneck of our situation. The issue is not to "make ourselves the masters" of technology. Which, strictly speaking, is

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meaningless. Nor to have an extra soul. We must be able to integrate into the technological system the qualitative external data capable of modifying the process at its origin. That is where the conflict is located and not, according to stupid images, in a rivalry between the robot computer and man dispossessed of his brain! We will study this problem in detail in the last part.

1

The point of departure for all conceptions is obviously Ludwig von Bertalanffy, General System Theory (rev. ed., 1969). 2 One of the first to present technology as a system without, however using the term was Ben. B. Seligman: A Most Notorious Victory, 1966. See also G. Weippert in his introduction to the collective volume Technik im technischen Zeitalter, 1965, which shows technology as a system but without fully grasping the significance of that finding-like Habermas. It is generally the American sociologists who are closest to seeing the reality of the technological world, probably because they live there! Donald A Schon (Technology and Change: the New Heraclitus, 1963) also intuitively senses this reality when he writes-the starting point for any present-day thinking about the technological system-that "technological innovation belongs less to us than we to it." Otherwise, however, though using the word "system," I by no means claim to go along with structuralist thought. I believe that technology is now constituted as a system just as scientists long ago, spoke of a system of forces or a thermal system. And I am not referring to the System, an absolute reality, existing in every social organization, every relationship, etc. 3 Richta regards the deterministic model of society and evolution as tied to the industrial order of things; he felt that everything changes with the scientific and technological revolution. And here he yields to the notion of system: "The situation changes when one or more factors [of industry] are replaced by a general dynamics in each of the numerous dimensions of productive forces and in the network of general circumstances, as soon as the subjectivity peculiar to the planned elements becomes the fundamental factor that cannot be disregarded, as soon as the simply external rationality of things gives way to a superior rationality of systems that are developing and changing." He concludes, however, that this requires the creative cooperation of men, which strikes me as less certain (Civilization at the Crossroads, P. 290). 4 Richta, in line with Simondon and Daumas, remarks that one cannot distinguish the degrees of technological development sharply enough if one prosaically views the machine as a perfected instrument, the automaton as a perfected machine. The machine is not an instrument; it is a mechanism using its own instruments, which implies an inversion of the subject and object. The machine uses man to serve it. And the automatic system is no machine either; it is an aggregate or a process of control utilizing machines. There is thus a new level of subjectivity, and the importance of the automaton for man is quite different from that of the machine. 5 I will not repeat the long discussions I devoted to this topic, concerning the factors that favored its appearance, as well as its characteristics. 6 Habermas's long analysis of the notion of "technocratic consciousness" is nothing but a development of what I studied in The Technological Society to explain the transition from the technological operation to the technological phenomenon. Habermas translates this philosophically when he discusses the elimination of the difference between praxis and technology, the blotting out of a desire for communication without domination behind the wish to deal with things technologically. 7 I am obviously in complete disagreement with Habermas (Technik und Wissenschaft als Ideologie), who confuses technology (French, technique) and technological discourse, and whose idea of what he means by Technik strikes me as totally dated! Ladmiral's preface to that book says: "Technologies or technological rules are applications of empirical knowledge formalized by the

experimental sciences; they put technological means to work on any material object capable of being reutilized systematically within the framework of certain sequences of instrumental activity." A simplistic definition, applicable perhaps to nineteenthcentury technology but having nothing to do with the present-day phenomenon! Nevertheless I respect Habermas for his modesty in stressing that his ideas on technology are an "interpretational schema that may be approached within the framework of an essay but not verified seriously as being employable." 8 I do not think that the structure of a given system allows us to interpret other systems. What characterizes each one is precisely its specificity in structure, character, and processing. Hence, I believe that using the structure of the linguistic system to analyze or even explain other systems is an error in scientific method. 9 The aim I am following here is thus very different from the two lines indicated by J. Baudrillard in Le Système des objets, 1968. On the one hand, he studies "the processes by which people enter into relationships with technological objects." What are the systematics of the resulting behaviors? On the other hand, he thinks that one can study technology by heeding only the technological objects forming a whole that can be studied, like a linguistic system, by means of structural analysis. Here, I am putting myself on the level of society, and confronting a technology that is made up not only of objects, but also of methods, programs, etc., and whose system cannot be studied outside of its relation, its integration in the social group. The neglect of those two aspects makes Baudrillard's work useless-subtle and interesting as it may be. He claims to establish the relationship between man and the technological object without precisely situating man in the technological universe. Hence, he ascribes certain attitudes to him, certain behaviors, whose explanation resides in the all-inclusiveness of technology, whereas Baudrillard always makes man a subject. Moreover, the double Marxist and Freudian bias, unadmitted, unelucidated, takes away much of the validity from this system of objects. 10 John Boli-Bennet, Technization, pp. 101ff. 11 See, for instance, Le Moigne, Les Systèmes de décision dans les organisations (1971). 12 Seligman (A Most Notorious Victory) offers a sort of analysis of the main American arguments against the notion that technology has become autonomous. He feels that the authors of these arguments are guilty of "a great distortion of facts, a fundamental ignorance of the new technology, simplistic and archaic conceptions." 13 On this problem, see the remarkable study by Sefez, L'Administration prospective (1970). 14 See the report L'information et les libertés (1975). 15 Norbert Wiener, God and Golem (1964); John von Neumann, The General Theory of Automata (1956); De Broglie, Machine à calculer et pensée humaine (1953); Toa, Brain Computer (1960); L. Couffignal, La Machine à penser (1952); Delaveney, La Machine à traduire (1963), etc. 16 For a criticism of the so-called results already obtained and of the forecasts, one should read: Vacca, Demain le Moyen Age (1973); Elgozy, Le Désordinateur (1972)-(the latter book is all the more interesting in that the author returns to a certain number of his earlier, far more positive stands expressed in Automation et Humanisme, 1978); and J.-M. Font/J.-C. Quinious, Les Ordinatears, mythes et réalités (1968), which offers a remarkable analysis of the myth of the universal computer, a robot ready to do anything, a creator of music and leisure activities, etc.

17

See the excellent study of the problem in Escarpit, Théorie générale de l'information and de la communication (1976). 18 This was sharply brought to light in Morris West's novel Harlequin. A change in program, subsequently erased, brings out a colossal deficit in a multinational corporation, with a probable embezzlement by one of the directors. Now people are dealing with such astronomical figures and with such complicated business matters that no human being can visualize them, no accounting department fully verify them. Only the computer is capable of all that. Hence, only the computer's result is real, and held to be such by consensus, even if the parties involved maintain that they have not done what they are accused of and that the business deal was kosher. But no one can truly check the validity of such undertakings. 19 See the previously cited report on data processing and freedom. 20 B. Charbonneau shows that there is an inevitable contradiction between the technological system and man: "The pretext of organization is the one thing it cannot give us: freedom. The 'conditions of freedom' are something that organization always achieves by routes opposite to freedom: organization. Hence, any progress left to its own devices will ultimately curtail the autonomy of individuals: freedom presupposes power, hence the power of the apparatus. But the apparatus presupposes the cog: collective power is made up of the powerlessness of individuals. In our increasingly organized societies, we may have more liberty because we are better fed and better taught; but these things are obtained by a proliferation of orders and prohibitions in all areas" (Le Chaos et le système). 21 In regard to these facilitation processes, see my Métamorphose du bourgeois, "Néo-Romantisme" (in Contre-point), and my books on revolution. 22 Ivan Illich (Tools for Conviviality) has an excellent view of the technological system when he shows that "the functioning and design of the energetic infrastructure of a modern society impose the ideology of the dominant group with a force and a penetration inconceivable to the priest . . . or the banker." I must endlessly reiterate a warning which I already gave in The Technological Society, and which Mumford brilliantly formulates: "Plainly, then, it is not the mechanical or electronic products as such that intelligent minds question, but the system that produces them without constant reference to human needs and without sensitive rectification when these needs are not satisfied." The Myth of the Machine, p. 334. 23 L. Mumford, in his rich book The Myth of the Machine, p. 184 comes very close to the idea of the technological system, but he actually perceives it as a product of automation, which strikes me as inaccurate. In contrast, he perfectly grasps the constraining and autonomous character of the system: "Once automatic control is installed one cannot refuse to accept its instructions, or insert new ones, for theoretically the machine cannot allow anyone to deviate from its own perfect standards. . . . Here, at the core of automation, lies its principle weakness once it becomes universal. Its exponents, even if they are able to recognize its deficiencies, see no way of overcoming them except by a further extension of automation and cybernation. . . . It is the system itself that, once set up, gives orders." 24 See Wernberg, Analyse et prévision, October 1966.

5 AUTONOMY

PART TWO The Characteristics of The Technological Phenomenon

SIMONDON has strikingly demonstrated the autonomous character of technology with what he calls "concretization," i.e., the existence of a concrete schema of organizational invention that remains underlying and stable through all the ups and downs and changes of the technological object. Hence, "concretization-adaptation is a process conditioning the birth of a milieu instead of being conditioned by an already given milieu: it is conditioned by a milieu that exists only virtually before the invention. . . . But this concretizing invention produces a technogeographic milieu, which is a condition for the functioning of the technological object: thus, the technological object is its own condition as well as the condition for the existence of this mixed technological and geographic milieu.” The autonomy of the technological object itself could not be better demonstrated than by the highly concrete examples he offers.1 The most elementary form of this autonomy is that of the machine in regard to the environment. As Ben B. Seligman (A Most Notorious Victory, 1966) notes, the machine seems to acquire a certain independence and function in itself. And he promptly generalizes: To be sure, one may speak of an interdependence between technology and its environment, but it is nevertheless technology that now dominates its environment. An autonomous technology. This means that technology ultimately depends only on itself, it maps its own route, it is a prime and not a secondary factor, it must be regarded as an "organism” tending toward closure and self-determination: it is an end in itself. Autonomy is the very condition of technological development. This autonomy corresponds precisely to what J. Baudrillard (Le Système des objets) sees under the name of functionality when he says that

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"functional qualifies not what is adapted to an end but rather what is adapted to an order or a system.” Each technological element is first adapted to the technological system, and it is in respect to this system that the element has its true functionality, far more so than in respect to a human need or a social order. And Baudrillard presents numerous examples of this autonomy, which transforms everything covered by technology into technological objects before being anything else: "The entire kitchen loses its culinary function and becomes a functional laboratory . . . an elision of prime functions for the sake of secondary functions of calculation and relation, an elision of impulses for the sake of culturality . . . a passage from a gestural universe of work to a gestural universe of control. . . . The simplest mechanism elliptically replaces a sum of gestures, it becomes independent of the operator as of the material to be operated on." Performing this function, technology endures no judgment from the outside nor any restraint. It presents itself as an intrinsic necessity. Let us recall a rather typical statement among a thousand. Professor L. Sedov, president of the Permanent Commission for the Coordination of Interplanetary Research in the USSR, has declared that no matter what difficulties or objections crop up, nothing could halt space research. "I feel that there are no forces capable today of stopping the historical processes" (October 1963). This remarkable declaration can apply to all technology. The technological system, embodied, of course, in the technicians, admits no other law, no other rule, than the technological law and rule visualized in itself and in regard to itself.2 I have discussed this phenomenon at length elsewhere. I will not dwell upon it here.3 However, we must know more about this autonomy. First of all, it is the notions or hopes that are modified by technology. An important aspect of this autonomy is that technology radically modifies the objects to which it is applied while being scarcely modified in its own features (if not its forms and modalities). Let us take a simple example. We distinguish between open data and closed data. Open data relates to still unsettled questions, it has an indeterminate content, it implies the participation of the interested parties. Closed data concerns a well-defined object, it can be coded and diffused instantaneously, and, of course, it is closed to participation. Only closed data takes advantage of all the technological means, only it can be rapidly transmitted, etc. Hence, the instant that technology is applied more rigorously in coding and transmitting data, the faster it accelerates and the more the data

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become closed, i.e., to exclude participation by everyone, despite the ideology and the moral desire one may have. We will not take up here the problem of the relationship between technology and science and technology's relative autonomy from science, since we treated these matters in The Technological Society. We will merely add four things emerging from recent studies. The man who, once again, has investigated this most closely is Simondon. And after showing the interconnections, he concludes not so much—obviously—that there is an autonomy pure and simple of technology, but that there is a possibility for technology to keep developing for a long, long while, even without basic research: Even if the sciences did not advance for a certain time, the progress of the technological object toward specificity could continue. The principle of this progress is actually the way in which the object causes itself and conditions itself in its own functioning and in the responses of its functioning to utilization-the technological object, issuing from an abstract work of an organization of subensembles, is the arena for a certain number of relationships of reciprocal causality. This text gives the precise point of the autonomy of the technological object and thereby specifies technology itself. In the same way, but going to extremes, Koyré (Études d'histoire de la pensée scientifique) opines that technology is independent of science and has no influence on it-which strikes me as impossible to support. J. C. Beaune, following Hall (The Scientific Revolution), likewise feels that science and technology have separate existences and autonomous developments, whose convergence was historically contingent; he also feels that the passage to scientific technology consisted in unifying the empirical and dispersed technologies, which I have called the passage from the technological operation to the technological phenomenon. These ideas merely take up what I wrote in 1950. Lastly, we can find numerous examples of both the correlation and the independence of technology in Closets. But they are not very significant! The second remark: John Boli-Bennet (Technization), in another connection, offers a stunning analysis of the relationship between science and technology. His is the most recent analysis that I know of, after Ernest Nagel (The Structure of Science, 1961), Karl Popper (The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 1959), and Carl Hempel (Aspects of Scientific Explanation, 1965). There are, says Boli-Bennet, two essential characteristics of scientific knowledge. The first is the

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“empirical proof of error": a statement cannot be accepted as scientific knowledge if it is theoretically impossible to find empirical data in respect to which the statement is invalid. The second is intersubjectivity, a concept that has replaced scientific objectivity: a statement is scientific only if it is liable to verification or "falsification" which is not subjective and individual, but intersubjective, each scientist never being more than one subject; but each subject having a certain knowledge and a certain background can repeat the same experiment, hence arrive at the same result. In sum, a scientific statement is one that is potentially "falsifiable" on an intersubjective level. On this basis, we can very clearly see the close relationship between science and technology, quite a different relationship from the one that observers have been hunting for years by setting up "causalities.” We will come across this science/technology problem again when studying the finalities of technology. But the mutual relationship between science and technology cannot be divorced from the relationship between technology and politics. It is through, and because of, technology that science is put in the service of government and that politics is so enamored of science. The third remark: The science/technology interpenetration has inter alias a radical effect that is admirably set forth by K. Pomian ("Le Malaise de la science" in Les Terreurs de l'an 2000, 1976): namely, the end of scientific innocence. There is no more neutral science, no more pure science. All science is implicated in the technological consequences. And the strength of Pomian's long and profound factual study lies in showing that there is no political implication here. As he demonstrates beyond dispute, the essential element is not the decision by politicians to use a scientific discovery in a certain way. But rather, the necessary implication of all scientific research in technology is the determining factor. It is the domination of the technological aspect over the epistemic aspect. And the factors operate in terms of one another. Militarization, nationalization, technicization are intercorrelated. In the same way, Pomian also points out that there is no good or bad use of science or technology. The two are indissoluble, so that science, he claims, is not neutral, but ambivalent. "To believe that a methodology is neither good nor bad is to tacitly assume that human happiness and suffering are quantities with opposite signs, canceling one another. Far from it. In moral arithmetic, if there is an arithmetic, the sum of two opposite quantities does not equal zero.” And we are gradually led to reverse the customary proposition: any

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scientific decision entails political consequences. "The decision to build a giant accelerator has political implications that the physicists cannot allow themselves to ignore.” Pomian cites numerous present-day cases of scientists realizing the consequences of what they are doing and demanding a halt to research (and not a better political application!). Take for examples, the group working around Berg (1974) and the Conference of Asilomar (1975). In contrast, Pomian reveals the politically oriented character of the manifesto of researchers at the Pasteur Institute (the group for biological information). The object of the manifesto is not really the science/technology problem but rather a political debate in the most banal sense of the word! It is politics which is more and more induced by technology and incapable now of steering technological growth in any direction. Lastly, we have to bring up a new analysis (1975),4 which fairly transforms the present study of the relationship between science and technology. First of all, we have to distinguish between mathematics (which develops deductively, starting with axioms, and operates upon abstract symbols) and the physical or natural sciences (which develop on an instrumental and material basis). These latter sciences can progress only from a technological ensemble, which is itself nothing but the materialization of theoretical schemata. Technology is both ahead of and behind science, and it is also at the very heart of science; the latter projects itself into technology and is absorbed into it, and technology is formulated in scientific theory. All science, having become experimental, depends on technology, which alone permits reproducing phenomena technologically. Now, technology abstractly reproduces nature to permit scientific experimenting. Hence, the temptation to make nature conform to theoretical models, to reduce nature to techno-scientific artificiality. "Nature is what I produce in my laboratory," says a modern physicist. In these conditions, science becomes violence (in regard to everything it bears upon), and the technology expressing the scientific violence becomes power exclusively. Thus, we have a new correlation, which I consider fundamental, between science and technology. The scientific method itself determines technology's calling to be a technology of power. And technology, by the means it makes available to science, induces science into the process of violence (against the ecology, for instance). "The power of technology (theoretically unlimited, but impossible to utilize effectively)

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materializes in a technology of power. "That is the ultimate point of this relationship.” Which the text summed up here calls the "Technological Baroque." *** Quite obviously, an autonomy from the state and from politics does not imply that there is no interference with, or political decision-making about, technology. I will certainly not deny the existence of the famous "military-industrial complex.” The state cannot help interfering. We have seen that it is tightly bound up with technology, that it is called upon by the technologies to widen its range of intervention. Hence, all the theorists, politicians, partisans, and philosophers agree on a simple view: The state decides, technology obeys. And even more, that is how it must be, it is the true recourse against technology. In contrast, however, we have to ask who in the state intervenes, and how the state intervenes, i.e., how a decision is reached and by whom in reality, not in the idealist vision. We then learn that technicians are at the origin of political decisions. Next, we have to ask in what direction the state's decision goes. And we perceive very quickly that a remarkable conjunction occurs. The state is furnished with greater power devices by technology, and, being itself an organism of power, the state can only move in the direction of growth, it is strictly conditioned by the technologies not to make any decisions but those to increase power, its own and that of the body social.5 Finally, since the system is far from being fully realized, politicians sometimes intervene, taking measures about technological problems, for purely political and in no way technological reasons. The result is generally disastrous. Those are the four points that we are going to examine rapidly. Habermas, starting with the presupposition and the democratic ideology, vaguely poses the question: How can we reconcile technology and democracy? But since his view of the technological reality is inexact, since his discourse is purely ideological, the idea of correcting, of mending technology in the actual world of practice is purely illusory. Certainly, the first question to trouble us is: What is becoming of democracy? Among the hundreds of articles on this topic, we can point out one by R. Lattès ("Énergie et démocratie Le Monde, April 1975) as significant because, written by a scientist, it ingenuously

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expresses all the ideas assumed by the most unreal idealism. I will not repeat my criticism of identical positions, as set forth in my article "Propagande et démocratie" (Revue de Science politique, 1963). Instead, I will limit myself to underlining two particular features. Monsieur Lattès rightly feels that for the exercise of democracy, all citizens must be well informed and judge with full knowledge of the facts. If parliamentary debate is to have any sense, all the deputies must be well educated and well informed. Then, regarding the problem of energy, Lattès asks seven "obvious" questions, whose answers one must know for any valid opinion in the energy debate. But he does not seem to realize for even an instant that this issue, paramount as its importance may be, is simply one of dozens: the risks of military policies, the multinational corporations, Inflation, its causes and remedies, the ways and means of aid to the third world, etc. For each issue, the citizen would have to have a complete, serious, elaborate, and honest file. Who could fail to see the absurdity of the situation! People do not even have time to “keep up to date." Furthermore, Lattès apparently believes that the correctly informed citizen could decide on the problem of nuclear energy beyond gut responses and panicky reactions. But (and I will develop this further on) what marks the situation is the inextricable conflict of opinions among the greatest scientists and technicians. The more informed the citizen, the less he can participate. Because the evaluations are perfectly contradictory. Lattès is deluding himself. But this is certainly more comforting! There is absolutely no way the citizen can decide for himself. Yet the politician is equally deprived (cf. "L'Illusion politique" in Finzi: Il potere tecnocratico).6 Thus, despite the advances made in understanding the state/technology problem, we must emphasize an opinion frequent among intellectuals: "To resolve the problems and difficulties caused by technology, we have to nationalize. We have to let the state run the whole thing.” That is Closets's implicit thesis, straight through; he tries to prove that all the dangers and abuses of technology are due to its lack of direction. We have to work out a general policy of progress, set up planning agencies, reorganize, etc. But all this can be done only by the political authorities, although he does not come right out and say so. We know that this is also Galbraith's thesis. Habermas does a superficial analysis of the relationship between

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technology and politics. He is content with arguments like: "the orientation of technological progress depends on public investments," hence on politics. He seems to be totally unaware of dozens of studies (including Galbraith's or mine) showing the subordination of political decisions to technological imperatives. He winds up with the elementary wish to "get hold of technology again" and "place it under the control of public opinion . . . reintegrate it within the consensus of the citizens.” The matter is, alas, a wee bit more complicated; likewise, when he contrasts the technocratic schema with the decision-making schema. To grasp the interaction, he ought to study L. Sfez (Critique de la décision, 1974). And Habermas's discussion of the "pragmatic model" is along the lines of a pious hope, a wish: the process of scientification of politics, such as appears desirable to him, is a "must.” But the reality of this technicization of politics actually occurs on a different model! Habermas poses the philosophical problem honesty: The true problem is to know if, having reached a certain level of knowledge capable of bringing certain consequences, one is content to put that knowledge at the disposal of men involved in technological manipulations, or whether one wants men communicating among themselves to retake possession of that knowledge in their very language. But Habermas poses the problem outside of any reality. When reading this text, we need only ask: Who is that "one" who puts technology at the disposal of either group? Who exercises this (if you like) supreme "will"? And Richta goes along with Galbraith! The state, they feel, returns to its true function of representing the general interest when it encourages science. "It is significant," writes Richta, "that the state intervenes most drastically in sectors in which science makes the most of itself as a productive force that, by nature, is hostile to private property and that endlessly exceeds its boundaries.” The American federal government finances 65% of all basic research, the French government 64%, for the profit motive can no longer make technology advance. But we are forgetting that the state thereby becomes a technological agent itself, both integrated into the technological system, determined by its demands, and modified in its structures by its relationship to the imperative of technological growth. And such is Dumont's way of thinking (L'Utopie ou la mort, 1975); but naturally, he never admits it! He merely talks of vast

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international organisms taking over the ensemble of technological progress, etc. Yet who can set them up if not a political authority? That is also Sauvy's well-known position (e.g., in his book on the automobile: Les Quatre Roues de la fortune, 1968). Who can oppose the automobile monster? Only the state, which must also be responsible for housing. But, to be sure—and Sauvy is well aware of this—not the present state, not the state as we see it functioning now. The same thing is taken for granted by Crozier (The Stalled Society): Technological innovation entails considerable difficulties in the body social, causing the upheaval of entire areas. . . . The economic organizations are unable to cope with this. The state must make the necessary collective investments to develop the ability of human groups and human organizations to overcome the effects of progress. "The state and the public authorities in general are the ones who must naturally take care of this. But extending their intervention and their necessary rationalization requires a new style of action totally different from the regulatory or distributory style of intervention in most modern states." And we find—again implicit—that same secret appeal to political authority when the excellent project of "change or disappear" (The Ecologist, 1972) asks (and rightly so) for taxes on raw materials, the revision of the rates of social preference by force of law, the obligatory regulation of the quality of air, water, soil usage, etc. Who will do all these things, even if there is no question of it? Obviously, the state. Besides, given that, in any event, technology produces a specialization (which is inevitable and the very condition of its success), but also given that the technological system functions as an overall system, no technician can thus grasp the technological phenomenon. Such a grasp would require the experience of the body social, a nontechnologically specialized collective organism—in other words, clearly the state. We find the same thing in the Mintz and Cohen book America IMC (1972). With enormous documentation, these authors show that the whole of American society is subject to two hundred ruling industrial firms-and for Mintz and Cohen, the sole issue is once again the supremacy of the government, which alone will permit the fight against technological abuses, against harmful effects (inequality, exploitation, etc.). It is, incidentally, once more the state that can assure technology its true place and its progress, because—they maintain—the giantism of economic ventures

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is one cause of blockage to technological advances (but Mintz and Cohen

never raise the problem of government giantism). Lastly (but, of course, the list is not closed), we have to recall Saint Mark's enthusiasm for having the state alone protect nature. Nationalizing and socializing nature is the way to save it-and such mastery would also make technology itself controlled, well oriented, useful, etc. Before such a roster of authorities, one is surprised and amazed. But also confused. just what are they talking about? That marvelous ideal organism, the incarnation of Truth and Justice, letting a sweet equality reign without suppression or repression, favoring the weak in order to equalize opportunities, representing the general interest without damaging private interests, promoting liberty for all by a happy harmony, insensitive to the pressures and struggles of interest, patient but not paternalistic, liberating while socialistic, administering without creating a bureaucracy, able to encourage new activities of regulation and concertedness without claiming to impose its law, in such a way as to allow the social actors to freely control the effects of technological progress. A state, finally, having Omnipotence, Omni-Science, without abusing them for anything in the world. . . One can only pinch oneself before such a pastoral! Has anyone ever laid eyes on such a state? And if not, what guarantee, what chance do we have that it will come true? Who are the people who will staff it? Saints and martyrs? The huge, the enormous mistake of all those excellent authors is simply that they never breathe a word about this mythical state, which they entrust with so many functions. Hitherto, the state, whatever its form, socialist or not, has been an organism of oppression, of repression, eliminating its opponents, and constituted by a political class that governs for its own benefit. Will someone explain to me in the name of whom and of what the state will be any different tomorrow-for the dictatorship of the proletariat is exactly the same thing. The marvelous state that will run technology and solve the problems is composed of men (Why should they no longer be dominated by the spirit of power?) and structures (which are more and more technological).7 What those authors are proposing is that we hand over all power to the administrations, increase administrative power (an ineluctable growth, to be sure, but in no wise a remedy)—i.e., to transform an aleatory control into a technological organization. In reality, not only is there no guarantee that the state will carry

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out its envisioned role. But, as can be demonstrated, this state, ruled by the technological imperative and no other, must unavoidably create a society that will be a hundred times more oppressive. It may be able to put order into the technological chaos, but not to control and direct it. It can only accentuate the features we are familiar with. Relying on the state (without considering the autonomy of technology and what the state will turn into under the pressure of technology) means obeying that so technological reflex of a specialist: Things are going badly in my sector, but my neighbor surely has the solution. Finally, it is interesting to note that the advocates of this position, while abominating technocracy, are summoning it with all their might. For a state qualified to dominate technology can only be made up of technicians! But we will come back to technocracy further on. Observers are admitting more and more that the large-scale technological directions are a matter of high-level political decision.8 (Thus, the construction of the 200 Ge V accelerator involves France's relations with Europe.) But this, from the lips of scientists and superior technicians, does not imply that politicians should decide for political reasons. On the contrary, it means that for these choices, politicians should heed the advice of specialists and that, say, in France, the famous commission of the Twelve Wise Men is notoriously inadequate. Constantly underscored is the fact that these political decisions cannot be left to the ultimate will of politicians.9 Gradually, the USSR has at last come to realize that for planning, the "political decision" can be made only after, and in terms of, the technological determination of all the elements. "It is clear," writes one of the specialists in Soviet planning, "that scientific forecasting must precede the plan.” Experts actually plan only what forecasting, qua science (or technology), establishes as possible and useful. The decision is therefore made by the scientists and technicians, not by the politicians.10 As always in these technological domains, Japan offers a quasipure model.11 A remarkably swift technological growth has just been joined by state intervention (the M. I. T. I. the Ministry of International Commerce and Industry, with its Agency for Science and Technology) for essentially political and nationalistic reasons in respect to the United States. First we note that here, politics is following technology, in time but also in the main aspects. And when the M. I. T. I. limits itself to aiding a technological branch toward financial independence from American firms, nothing much has changed—except for the nationalist sentiments! But, even in

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Japan, no political intervention can leave well enough alone. Politics absolutely has to claim control. And thus we witness enormous decisions: the direction of aid (and hence of all technology) toward "large-scale programs" (of course!): data processing, nuclear energy, space. . . Naturally, neither the soft technologies nor the individual distribution of the small technologies interest the state, which is more concerned with the peak sectors and the spectacular. Hence, because of this intervention, we may expect serious imbalances in the development. Furthermore, the errors caused by political intervention have once again been perceived. Thus, a Japanese group managed to build a purely Japanese rocketship and satellite outside the capitalist firms. The M. I. T. I. got interested and entrusted the space program to an agency (M. A. S. D. A.), involving the big firms and reintroducing the American influence through them. But above all, the M. I. T. I. finally decided that, for the moment, nothing could be done in these areas. Once again, state intervention is incoherent and obstructive. It is always the mixture of and confusion between the two that produces the mistakes. Either the government selects or prohibits a certain technology (often because of the influence of a prestigious scientist or a pressure group). Or it turns one possible trend among several into an obligation by sheer political decision. Very frequently, a government adopts a technology and imposes it on a country. But is perverts the dynamics, precisely because that one technology is part of an ensemble, whereas the government, by its choice, gives it a preferential and, above all, obligatory character. This simple passage from the pragmatic to the legal changes the tenor of technology, and all the great technological errors come from that political imperative: e.g., the choice of the atomic "line"; the choice of oil over coal as a source of heat; and also the choice of oil over dams for producing electricity. In one precise point, L. Siegel's fine article ("Le Champ de bataille électronique au Vietnam" in Science et Paix, 1973) effectively shows the role of politics: Most of the electronic fighting processes were known for a long time; but it was the Nixon doctrine of ubiquitous recourse to automation that gave them a predominant role. Political choice takes place in an arsenal of technologies, which cannot all be employed at the same time. But, in contrast, Illich perfectly attests the uselessness of politics in regard to the technological system. "As for the oppositions who want to gain control of existing institutions, they thus give them a

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new kind of legitimacy while exacerbating their conditions. Changing the ruling team is not a revolution. What does power to the workers mean, black power, women's power, or that of the young, if not that their power is to replace the power in office? Such power is, at best, that of better managing growth, which is thereby enabled to pursue its glorious course thanks to these providential takeovers of power! School, whether teaching Marxism or Fascism, reproduces a pyramid of classes of failures. The airplane, even if made accessible to the worker, reproduces a social hierarchy with a superior class.” I heartily go along with these ideas! To conclude, we will not go into detail about an issue already treated in The Technological Society: When the state makes purely political decisions, it is the politician alone who decides; and this always causes disasters on the technological level. I will limit myself to a few additional examples: (1) that of the affair of the French Commissariat for Atomic Energy, where it was discovered in 1969 that political imperatives were behind the bottleneck in technological development in the atomic domain; (2) and that of the posthumous work (1964-1969) of the great Soviet economist Varga, who formally accuses the political authorities (and not just the bureaucrats) of grossly interfering with technological (and not just economic) growth. We will give further examples when we study the possibility of technological blockage due to the growth of political power. To wind up, we will cite a fact that stunningly reveals the dependence of politics and the autonomy of technology. The technological demand is dependent on technological means and not on political ideologies. For instance, Peru has immense copper resources in Cuajone. Experts are unanimous in affirming the incredible wealth of these deposits. But they are very hard to get at and extract. In 1968, Peru turned to the USSR. Soviet experts carefully examined the problem, and their highly detailed report concluded that only the United States had the technology to properly mine the deposits. These experts advised Peru to confide the work to the Americans. In early 1970, the Peruvian government was in a quandary about handing over the "Cuajone contract" after expropriating the International Petroleum Company. But what strikes me as important here is that most of the nontechnicized countries must either leave their riches unexploited or else appeal to highly technicized countries—whatever their ideological outlook may be. Ideological imperialism is nonsense. Only the technological weight gives true superiority.

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It might now be useful to focus on the idea of autonomy from economics, for misunderstandings abound. Quite clearly, one cannot separate technology and economy, as Simondon strikingly points out: "Thus there exists a convergence of economic constraints (decrease in raw materials, in work, in energy consumption, etc.) and of properly technological demands. . . . But it seems that the latter would predominate in the technological evolution.” Simondon shows that the areas in which the technological conditions override the economic conditions are those in which technological progress has been most rapid. The reason, he says, is that the economic causes "are not pure," they interfere with a diffuse network of motivations and preferences, which rotate or overthrow them. And it is to some extent the "pure" character of the technological phenomenon that assures its autonomy. Hence, sociologists imperceptibly slide from the primacy (and autonomy) of economics to the primacy (and autonomy) of technology. This is not generally formalized, clearly worded, or enunciated as an overall reality; but more often, it is a subliminal thought, latently taken for granted, as it were. "It goes without saying" for most observers that technology is what determines and causes events, progress, general evolution, like an engine that runs on its own energy. Technology in the intellectual panorama plays the same part as spirituality in the Middle Ages or the idea of the individual in the nineteenth century. Observers do not proceed to any clear and total analysis, but one cannot conceive of society or history in any other way. This trend is so powerful that it crops up even in those who deny it.12 I must, however, add some clarification. When I first analyzed technology's autonomy from economics, certain readers saw this as a declaration of absolute autonomy—and their criticism was aimed at this absolute. Yet I had emphasized that my term did not imply an equivalence between technology and divinity. It is no use saying, "Either there is autonomy, and hence it is absolute—or it is not absolute, and hence there is no autonomy." This kind of theoretical argument does not go very far. Everyone knows that a sovereign state today cannot do anything it pleases with its sovereignty; belonging to the "concert of nations" is a practical limit on sovereignty. Yet being sovereign, being colonized, having a government imposed by an invader, are not one and the same. Thus, I never said that technology was not dependent on

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anything or anyone, that it was beyond reach, etc. Obviously, it is subject to the counterthrust of political decisions, economic crises. I indicated, for example, that a government decision at odds with the law of development in technology, with the logic of the system, could halt technological progress, wipe out positive consequences, etc., but that in the conflict between politics and technology, the former would inevitably lose out, and that such a political decision, going against a technological imperative, would ultimately be ruinous for politics itself It is quite obvious that technology develops on the basis of a certain number of possibilities offered by the economy. And when the economic resources are lacking, technology cannot operate at its full capacity, achieving what its possibilities allow it to achieve. The relationship between technology and economy is complex. Technology is a determining factor in economic growth, but the converse is equally true. Closets shows clearly that the impact of technology on economy is ambiguous and that economic advances are not proportionately highest where there is the most technological research. Still, technology develops most rapidly in the peak sectors, and it is there too that economy follows. The relationship between the two is striking. In the United States, exports rose an average of 4% in 1967, but 58% for computers, 35% for aeronautics, 30% for telecommunications hardware. Here, the direct relationship is reestablished, but with technology being decisive for economy. The relationship varies with the periods. It does not appear certain, first of all, that a relationship exists between the great movements of technological invention and the economic or social structure. The technological inventions seem like unforeseeable givens of civilization and are by no means tied to the economic level. Nor is technological invention today tied to any one country. It breaks away from those who have encouraged it and benefits countries that did not take part in the effort of scientific or technological invention. But when we leave the domain of invention and proceed to application, technology presumes the involvement of greater and greater capitals. Can one say that industrial development is what conditions the possibility of technological growth? (Considering that industry is itself a product of technology!) Most technological research in the twentieth century, so it seems, is conditioned and stimulated when the market causes an industrial boom. However, M. Daumas (Revue d'histoire des sciences et de leur application, 1969), on the

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contrary, forcefully asserts the autonomy of technology from industry. And he maintains (which has always been my position): "There is no denying that the evolution of technologies can be understood only if placed in its original historical context; but it is all right to think that the original task of the historian of technologies consists precisely in revealing the intrinsic logic of the evolution of technologies. This evolution actually takes place with an internal logic, which is a very distinct phenomenon from the logic in the evolution of socio-economic history. . . . Investigating this internal logic in the technological evolution is the only way for 'the technological history of the technologies' to slough off its character of data history." With the spread and growing complexity of technological development, invention in its turn depends on already acquired technological bases (the outcome of earlier applications) and involves more and more expensive elements. Hence, technological invention comes to depend also on possibilities of economic investment. We thus perceive a mutual influence. On the one side, all modern economic growth depends on technological application, in all areas.13 But, vice versa, the possibilities of advanced technological research and of the application of technologies depend both on the economic infrastructure and on possibilities of mobilizing economic resources. (Further on, we will examine the problem of economic restraint on technology.) Negatively, the economy can thus either block technological development for lack of power or prevent technological application. The technological program is conditioned by two series of economic imperatives: in a capitalist country by the profitability of investment; and everywhere by the possibility of obtaining the funds necessary for investment. Nevertheless, at the moment, this is less and less so, for people are coming to realize how impossible it is to calculate the profitability of investments in basic research, and they are growing more and more "convinced" that this research is essential, cannot be neglected, etc. The relationship between technological research and profitability is no longer direct. Hence, the technological applications will be highly unequal according to the economic forms and levels. The latter cause an inequality both in the intensity of technological progress and in the rapidity of access to the profits of technologies. All this is obvious. But the importance of the economic factor notwithstanding, I will maintain the concept of technology's self

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sufficience in the sense that economy can be a means of development, a condition for technological progress, or, inversely, it can be an obstacle, but never does it determine, provoke, or dominate that progress. Like political authority, an economic system that challenges the technological imperative is doomed. It is not economic law that imposes itself on the technological phenomenon; it is the law of technology which orders and ordains, orients and modifies the economy.14 Economics is a necessary agent. It is neither the determining factor nor the principle of orientation. Technology obeys its own determination, it realizes itself. And by so doing, it naturally employs many other, nontechnological factors. It may be blocked by their absence, but its reason for functioning and growing comes from nowhere else. Modifying a political or an economic system is perfectly ineffective today and does not alter the true condition of man, because this condition is now defined by its milieu and its technological possibilities, and because the impact of political or economic revolutions on the technological system is practically nil. At most, these troubles can hold up technological progress for a certain time; but revolutionary power changes nothing in the intrinsic law of the system. This autonomy will get its institutional face in self-organization. That is to say, normally, the technological world will itself organize technological research, the direction of application, the distribution of funds, etc. The autonomy of the technological system must be matched by the autonomy of the institutions that are part of it, that embody it. And this, incidentally, will be the only acceptable autonomy in our society, because it will be the only one providing an ultimate justification. The basic research oriented toward technology cannot develop unless it is sufficiently autonomous! There is an excellent study on this topic by Monsieur Zuckerkandl, research director of France's National Center of Scientific Research (Le Monde, November 1964). One of the effects of autonomy is that technology is becoming the principle factor in reclassifying the domains of activity, of ideological directions. Thus, in 1950, I studied the way technology is making political regimes more similar and reducing the role of ideologies: e.g., the Soviet and the American systems. Likewise, technology is causing a reclassification of public and private activities: the distinction is fading between the economic activities of these two areas. All this was taken up and demonstrated at length by Galbraith in The New Industrial State and by M. L. Weidenbaum

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in "Effets à long terme de la grande Technologie," Analyse et prévision, 1969. But the essential point is to see that these effects derive from the autonomy of technology. Evidently, it is hard for the Marxists to admit that technology has become an autonomous factor, dominating the economic structure and having the same nature and effects in both a capitalist and a communist regime. The most frequently developed argument is that, without any possible doubt, technology is simply in the service of capital, that the familiar effects are due to its integration in capitalism. The technician is merely a salaried employee like the others, the ideology of efficiency is not technological but rather the reflection of the profit need. The division of labor and specialization are not products of technology, but additional ways of exploiting the working class, etc. The most complete effort at systematically demonstrating this interpretation was made by Benjamin Coriat (Science, technique et capital, 1976).15 That is why I will stick to his book rather than lesser works along the same lines. The two themes to be demonstrated bear, first of all, on the fact that the power of decision belongs to capital. It is capital that decides whether or not to use technologies; the capitalist technologies are as much technologies of production as they are technologies of controlling the exploited class; and capital uses the technologies only when they can procure greater profits. If the author admits that technology is not neutral, then only in the sense that it serves capitalism exclusively. The capitalist mode of production has one single goal: the valorization of capital; and by examining the contributions made by the different types of inventions to capital in its process of self-valorization, one can expose the (social) causes determining the incorporation or rejection of the various technologies. Capital utilizes only those that increase the extraction of surplus value. Likewise, the law of value defines the very space in which the technological rationality can operate. Naturally, the author accuses Richta of dodging the law of value and the production relations in and under which technology is put to work. But the entire basis of his demonstration rests on Marx's demonstration that capital resorts to mechanization only under two conditions: (1) when the use of dead labor (accumulated in the machine) permits obtaining more surplus labor (diminishing the part of the day that the worker devotes to his own production and increasing that part which goes back to capital); (2) when the technologies allow capital to better dominate the labor process. Those are the chief arguments, and they are constantly reiterated

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throughout Coriat's book. The reader is somewhat surprised. For the upshot would be that with technological progress, the worker is more dominated today. Now is it accurate to state that the working class is more dominated today than a century ago? It would also mean that the rate of surplus value has considerably increased. Yet everyone, including the Marxists, agrees that the rate of surplus value is decreasing-just as, by the way, Karl Marx predicted. It would also mean that capitalism is discriminating between applied and nonapplied technologies according to the one criterion indicated; hence technological development ought to increase the power and security of capitalism. Yet it is rather clear that for the past half century, classical capitalism has been losing every contest and regularly weakening because of the technologies, which are developing towards socialism. Finally, there is the statement that technological progress can be appreciated only in reference to the concept of the productivity of human labor, the latter being the sole producer of value. But this statement obviously neglects the fact that the modern technologies tend to eliminate working-class labor and place man on the fringe of the production process. What I find so startling about Coriat's work is his dogmatism and his inability to consider present-day phenomena. All his ideas rest on the implicit conviction that nothing has changed in 150 years, that technology is the same in 1975 as it was in 1848, that capitalism has not evolved. Technology has not modified the operating conditions of capital, such as Marx established; that is the basic decision. "The capitalist must and does reproduce the bases for the division of labor and for the ensemble of relations between production and labor that characterize the division of labor." The "must" is typical. The reasoning is as follows: So long as we are not yet in the communist society, we are in the capitalist society. And the latter cannot change; it is always the same; capitalism is capitalism " and that's that. Hence, technology must remain subordinate and enter the framework of Marxian analysis. On the one side, there is capitalism, in which the productive forces develop in terms of the accumulation of capital. On the other side, there is socialism, with a collective capacity of mass production and mass initiative. Technology is nothing particular in this dichotomy. Hence, envisioning science and technology as a process bound up with the process of capital accumulation becomes a necessity. Yes, to be sure, a necessity, so long as we take the prerequisites as demonstrated. But none of this is so. We are given presuppositions throughout. Presupposing that Marx was not mistaken, how can we

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admit modern technology into Marx's demonstration? That is the true problem that Coriat was confronted with. How ironic of him to quote Marx: "The word process expresses development viewed in the entirety of its real conditions.” Whereas in Coriat, we have two unrealities: one of dogma, the other of living in the past. He will only concede: "Naturally, technology remains, but before technology there is politics, the class struggle, and the appropriation of technology by capital." The two impossible lines in his reasoning are, therefore, hardline dogmatism and perfect unrealism. As to the former, his book can convince only those who regard Marx as infallible and as having said it all. For Coriat's method consists in taking Marxist notions or quotations and developing them abstractly, as though they were metaphysical truths, never once applying them concretely. The concrete situation cannot have changed so greatly as to render Marx's analysis inaccurate. That is the basis. But at no point do we find either an elucidation of real facts or a demonstration; all we get is a glossing of texts. The second defect, unrealism, keeps manifesting itself throughout. When Coriat happens to offer examples (the reason why there was no chemical progress in France during the late nineteenth century, or the scientific specialization decided on by capitalism, or the domestication of science by capital after the construction of the atomic bomb), we enter the realm of sheer phantasmagoria. Likewise, he has to reply to the rather easy criticism that technology is the same in the USSR and in the Western world, with the same structure and the same effects. Coriat's answer is not new. He simply says that the USSR is not socialist. Luckily, we have China to fall back on. Precisely because China has not reached the stage of a technological society, one can say: "You see, technology there is not what it is here.” But it never dawns on Coriat that this may be quite simply because her technological level (save for a few peak sectors, which, incidentally, are constructed altogether differently) is at a pretechnological stage! Besides, how can anyone fail to see that it is a bit much to peacefully declare that the USSR is not socialist. We are not skirting the issue by asking if the impact of technology (and not one man's paranoid delirium) could just possibly have been what reversed the effects of the Revolution of 1917 and led to the present situation. But the most characteristic thing about Coriat's unrealism is his living in the past. Coriat takes Taylorism and mechanization as examples, models, and the ne plus ultra of technology. We must be

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dreaming! Nothing fundamental has occurred; there has been no change in the technological structure since Taylor. Technology is summed up in and boils down to: the machine. We can obviously understand in these circumstances that Marx's analyses are accurate for those facts that are contemporary with, or very slightly subsequent to, Karl Marx. But the mistake is to claim that we are still back there. In Coriat, technology is nothing but the industrial application of science in terms of the production of goods (in the narrow sense). He blissfully declares that the technologies whose goal is not to produce goods are unemployed! And his critique of Taylorism (as if that were the present situation) corresponds to a labor situation of 1930. In other words, Coriat's "demonstration" is acceptable only for the reader who first grants total approval to the literal expression of Karl Marx's thought and who totally "pooh-poohs" the present facts about technology. Coriat remains enclosed in a problematics established on totally obliterated facts. *** We would like to dwell on a further aspect of that autonomy from values and ethics.16 Man in his hubris—above all intellectual—still believes that his mind controls technology, that he can impose any value, any meaning upon it. And the philosophers are in the forefront of this vanity. It is quite remarkable to note that the finest philosophies on the importance of technology, even the materialist philosophies, fall back upon a preeminence of man.17 But this grand pretension is purely ideological. What is the autonomy of technology all about in regard to values and morals? One can, I feel, analyze five aspects. First of all, technology does not progress in terms of a moral ideal, it does not seek to realize values, it does not aim at a virtue or a Good. We will examine this in the chapter on causal progression. Secondly, technology does not endure any moral judgment. The technician does not tolerate any insertion of morality in his work. His work has to be free. It seems obvious that the researcher must absolutely not pose the problem of good and bad for himself, of what is permitted or prohibited in his research. His research, quite simply, is. And the same is true for its application. Whatever has been found is applied, quite simply. The technician applies his technology with the same independence as the researcher. Now this is the great illogic of many intellectuals. They agree on the first term, which strikes them as obvious, but they want to reintroduce

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judgments on good and evil, human and inhuman, etc., when they come to the second term, that the technician ought to use his technology to do good. Yet this makes no sense at all after the first term, for application coincides exactly with research. Technological invention is already the outcome of a certain behavior. The problem of behavior (on which people claim to have a value judgment) does not arise only with application. (We will study the conflict between power and values in the last part.) It is the same behavior that dictates the attitude of research (claiming it to be free) and the attitude of application. The technician who puts something to work claims to be as free as the scientist who does the research. Thus it is childish of an intellectual to bring morality into the consequences if he has rejected it in the principle. The autonomy of technology is established here chiefly by a radical division of two areas: "each for itself.” Morality judges moral problems. It has nothing to do with technological problems: only the technological means and criteria are acceptable. An absolutely engrossing study was done by an American technologist on the following theme18: So long as the problems are purely technological, they can always find a clear and certain solution. But once the human factor has to enter, or once these problems become too large for any direct technological handling, they seem insoluble. Confronted with these difficulties, people have been developing "social engineering.” This innovation appeals to the better feelings; a whole improvement of man rests on the finer instincts and it claims that the route will be the improvement of man, albeit obtained by technologies (psychological or psychosociological technologies). Now after a certain number of examples, the author feels that this route is unsuccessful and uncertain because there are too many nontechnological factors. The only way out is to transform all the problems into a series of specifically technological questions, each receiving its solution from the adequate technology. Here, we can be sure of getting results by avoiding a mixture of types. There is no finer example affirming technological autonomy! Morality, psychology, humanism—they all get in the way. Such is the obvious verdict. And this is reinforced by the philosophical certainty that only man can be subjected to a moral appraisal. "We are no longer in that primitive epoch when things were good or bad per se: things are only as man makes them. Everything boils down to him. Technology is nothing in itself.” But in formulating this oversimplification, the intellectual fails to realize that man is dependent on technology

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and that, since the latter has become free of all moral judgment, the above statement would imply precisely that technology could do anything. Man does what technology allows him to do. He has thus undertaken to do anything. Maintaining that morality should not judge invention or technological operation leads to saying, unwittingly, that any human action is now beyond ethics. The autonomy of technology thus renders us amoral. Henceforth, morality will no longer be part of our domain, it will be shunted off into the void. In the eyes of scientists and technicians, morality-along with all values and what can be called humanism—is a purely private matter, having nothing to do with concrete activity (which can only be technological) and with no great interest in the seriousness of life. Here is a small example. In March 1961, the French Minister of National Education launched a survey among students at the scientific Grandes Écoles (the faculties specializing in professional training) and in the preparatory classes for these schools. The questionnaire dealt with the teaching of philosophy and literature. The outcome was significant. The students were almost unanimous in denying any sense or value in philosophy. As for the teaching of French, they made a distinction: Literature was totally uninteresting; but knowledge of the language, in contrast, was useful for writing reports and describing experiments. That is a fine illustration. The technician does not see any bearing that the study of ethics or philosophy can have on his work. Naturally, he admits that the specialists on moral problems, the philosophers, et al., can pass opinions on this work, pronounce judgments. But that is no concern of his. It is pure speculation. There are more and more works of philosophy, sociology of technology (and the theology of technology is beginning to blossom); but their only audience is within the circle of philosophers and humanists. They have no outlet whatsoever into the world of technicians, who utterly ignore all this research. And this is not simply due to specialization. These technicians live in a technological world that has become autonomous.19 Since technology does not support any ethical judgment, we come to the third aspect of its autonomy. It does not tolerate being halted for a moral reason. Needless to say, it is simply absurd to voice judgments of good or evil against an operation that is deemed technologically necessary. The technician quite frankly shrugs off something that strikes him as utterly fantastic; besides, we know how relative morality is. The discovery of "situational morality" is

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quite convenient for putting up with anything. How can we cite a variable, fleeting, constantly redefinable good in order to forbid the technician anything or stop a technological advance? The latter is at least stable, certain, evident. Technology, judging itself, is now liberated from what was once the main check on human action: beliefs (sacred, spiritual, religious) and ethics. Technology, with a theory and a system, thereby assures the freedom that it has acquired in fact. It no longer has to fear any limitation whatsoever because technology exists beyond good and evil. For a long time, observers claimed that technology was neutral, and consequently not subject to morality. That is the situation we have just described, and the theoretician who thus described technology was merely rubber-stamping the de facto independence of technology and the technician. But this stage is already passed. The power and autonomy of technology are so well assured that now technology itself is turning into a judge of morality. A moral proposition will not be deemed valid for our time if it cannot enter the technological system and be consistent with it.20 The fourth aspect of this autonomy concerns legitimacy. Modern man takes for granted that anything scientific is legitimate, and, in consequence, anything technological. Today, we can no longer merely say: "Technology is a fact, we have to accept it as such, we cannot go against it.” This is a serious position which reserves the possibility of judgment. But such an attitude is looked upon as pessimistic, antitechnological, and retrograde. Indeed, we must enter the technological system by acknowledging that everything occurring within it is legitimate per se. There is no exterior reference. There is no asking the question about truth (for now, truth is included in science, and the truth of praxis is technology pure and simple), or the question about good, or the question about finalities. None of these things can be discussed. The instant something is technological, it is legitimate, and any challenge is suspect. Technology has even become a power of legitimation. It is technology that now validates scientific research, as we shall demonstrate further on. This is very remarkable, for hitherto, man has always tried to refer his actions to a superior value, which both judged and underpinned his actions, his enterprises. But this situation is vanishing for the sake of technology. Man in our society both discerns this autonomy demanded by the system (which can progress only if autonomous) and grants this system autonomy by accepting it as legitimate in itself. This autonomy is obviously not

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the outcome of a struggle between two personified divinities, Morality and Technology! It is man who, becoming a true believer in, and loyal supporter of, technology, views it as a supreme object. For it must be supreme if it bears its legitimacy in itself and needs nothing to justify it! This conviction is spawned by both experience and persuasion; for the technological system contains its own technological power of legitimation, advertising. It is shallow to believe that advertising is an external addition to the system, due to the domination of technology by profit seeking. Advertising is a technology, indispensable to technological growth and meant to supply the system with its legitimacy. This legitimacy actually comes not just from the excellence that man is ready to acknowledge in technology, but by the persuasion that in fact every element of the system is good. That is why advertising had to add public relations and human relations. By no means does "the mass consumer society vote for itself," but rather, it is the technological society that integrates the individual in the technological process by means of that justification. There is, however, a further stride to be made, and quite a normal one at that. Independent of morals and judgments, legitimate in itself, technology is becoming the creative force of new values, of a new ethics. Man cannot do without morality! Technology has destroyed all previous scales of value; it impugns the judgments coming from outside. After all, it wrecks their foundations. But being thus self-justified, it quite normally becomes justifying. What was done in the name of science was just; and now the same holds true for what is done in the name of technology. It attributes justice to human action, and man is thus spontaneously led to construct an ethics on the basis of, and in terms of, technology.21 This does not occur in a theoretical or systematic manner. The elaboration only comes afterwards. The technological ethics is constructed bit by bit, concretely. Technology demands a certain number of virtues from man (precision, exactness, seriousness, a realistic attitude, and, over everything else, the virtue of work) and a certain outlook on life (modesty, devotion, cooperation). Technology permits very clear value judgments (what is serious and what is not, what is effective, efficient, useful, etc.). This ethics is built up on these concrete givens; for it is primarily an experienced ethics of the behavior required for the technological system to function well. It thereby has the vast superiority over the other moralities of being truly experienced. Furthermore, it involves obvious and ineluctable sanctions (for it is the functioning of the technological system

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that reveals them). And this morality therefore imposes them almost self-evidently before crystallizing as a clear doctrine located far beyond the simplistic utilitarianisms of the nineteenth century.22 *** A very fine example of this autonomy of technology was supplied by a celebrated text: Jacques Monod's inaugural lecture at the Collège de France in 1967. He explained clearly and artlessly that the reason why our society is suffering from angst, and why modern man is living a life of anxiety, is the "distrust of our contemporaries towards science," their alienation from scientific culture. (This is a remarkable test of the psychology of the man of science, who interprets the slightest reserve toward science and technology as distrust and fails to perceive the blinding faith, the magical trust, the irrational resignation of all our contemporaries in regard to science!). We wish to go on living in an outmoded society with institutions, morals, a system of values rendered obsolescent by “science and technology," and already nearly annihilated. We wish to hold them as valid while "science and technology" demonstrate that they are nothing anymore, devoid of any meaning or basis. It is by sticking to old values and refusing to recognize new values, the ethics of science (and of technology), that man makes himself unhappy. All we have to do is adopt the ethics of knowledge (first adding that of action), and everything will be all right. The discord in man, the new society created by technology, the new universe known by science will be appeased. "The only goal, the supreme value, the sovereign good, of the ethics of knowledge are not—let us own up to it—the happiness of mankind, and even less man's temporal power or comfort, or even the Socratic know-thyself: they are really the objective knowledge itself. I feel that we have to say so, we have to systematize this ethics, bring out the moral, social, and political consequences, we have to propagate it and teach it, for, as the creator of the modern world, this ethics alone is compatible with the modern world." There is no better way of saying that science has liquidated everything constituting traditional society and that it has created a new morality. Unfortunately, our scientist has forgotten one detail. His science is not, is never pure; it is applied. And it is a serious error for him to continue as he does: "[This new morality is] a conquering and in certain ways even Nietzschean ethics, because it

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is a will to power: but a power uniquely in the noesphere. An ethics that will consequently teach a scorn of violence and of temporal domination." What an illusion when it is a science that cannot fail to be applied and that not only furnishes the instruments of power but makes sure that these instruments have surpassed the spirit of power and have become in themselves the frenzy of Dionysius. What a voluntary blindness to believe in the social ethics of freedom through science, for it is a falsehood to say that the only end of science is knowledge. This is wrong even in the most abstract thoughts of the scientists. For science has only one true goal: application, the transition to practice, which is the true sense, the true criterion of research. Consequently, the decisive factor is technology, the new morality is technological. This follows directly from Monod's unfinished discourse. *** It is this autonomy of technology that makes it well-nigh useless to cite dangers and harmful effects. The issues that are specifically raised are then classified in separate domains. On the one hand, the analysis of the effects of radioactivity; but on the other hand, the technological research, e.g., the use of atomic energy in producing electrical power. Mixing the two will be deemed incongruous. When Monsieur Sauvy claims that nearly all pollution problems can be solved by developing atomic energy, he makes sure not to bring up the problem of atomic pollution (Croissance zéro?). Conversely, although well aware of these dangers, the technicians of atomic energy limit themselves to advancing their research in its own direction; the big problem is thus the use of plutonium. In reality, the imperative of technology suffices to legitimize further research while disregarding potential uses (the accusation leveled by scientists and technicians at the soldiers and politicians is naive) or actual dangers. The big weapon in these terms is "division," which allows each individual to escape the responsibility for his acts; everyone obeys not a judgment brought upon technology, but the development imperative that is included in the technological system. And that is also what makes technology a justifying system. Here we have the same reversal that I studied in detail with respect to the sacred: The desacralizing factor becomes in its turn the sacred. Likewise, the fact of having become autonomous gives technology a supreme

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situation: There is nothing above it that can judge it. Hence, it transforms itself into a supreme authority: Everything has to be judged in technology's terms. And whatever is done for the sake of technological growth is justified for that very reason. The celebrated formula "You can't stop [technological] progress" in no wise means "one can't," but rather "we have to participate in it.” Remarkably, Sauvy, the grand killer of prevailing ideas, winds up his book on growth with, of all things, that platitude: In any event, you can't stop progress. He thus acknowledges that we are not the masters of technology, indeed that we cannot resist "progress.” In other words, technology has become a moral value: whatever supports it is good, whatever hobbles it is bad. And ultimately, people accept as normal the monstrosities presented by Rorvik or Toffler for the future (e.g., putting a few electrodes in a newborn infant's brain to speed up his education, increase his capacities for assimilation, pleasure, etc.), or those monstrosities which have been already accepted (e.g., the therapeutic experiments on human beings as practiced in the United States since at least 1949 and permitted by the "charta on research bearing upon man" (World Medical Association, Helsinki, 1964). French jurisprudence, which refuses to accept just any experiment whatsoever, even with the consent of the subject, is harshly judged by all technicians: The law is impeding progress . . . Physicians demand the power to decide when they should experiment, and, in quest of a technological morality, Fourastié seems to back them up: "The generation of discovery is also that of experiments. It is inconceivable today that a physician should not also be an experimenter" (Colloque sur l'expérimentation, March 1971). Of course, all that must be linked to a "garniture," i.e., everyone has set out to discover the foundations of a collective ethics. The right to manipulate the individual is for the good of society, the common interest, collective solidarity, etc. But we are here dealing with the ideological superstructure, which is meant to provide clear consciences. What is really at stake, however, is the autonomy of technology, which justifies what is done in terms of technological power. The moral discourse attached to that is a further justification for the man who knows that he is objectively justified in advance. This reversal is altogether astonishing in Melvin Kranzberg's article "Technology and Human Values" (The Virginia Quarterly Review, 1964). As the author clearly shows, it is not the values that should authorize us to judge technology, simply because technology itself creates values. Kranzberg makes a point of demonstrating

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that freedom, justice, happiness are rationalizations of what technology has already effectuated. The values are secondary; it is technology which produces them, but which likewise renders them obsolete. It is because technology wiped out serfdom and slavery that man thought and spoke of "freedom.” Hence, there is no contradiction between a properly understood humanism and technology. Since everything rests on the use that man makes of technology, "the question is not to know if man is going to master technology but if man can master himself: that is the technological imperative, that is the humanist imperative.” This is a formula that we come upon often, namely, that technology reveals human capacity. The computer is "man laid bare," etc. In other words, in all these affirmations and all these fallaciously self-evident things, it is technology that is ultimate, that is a value, in terms of which everything has to be judged, appreciated, ordered, etc. Therefore, technology is quite autonomous, although no one has been audacious enough to articulate this outrageous truth. *** To conclude these observations on technological autonomy, we have to add two remarks. One on the relationship between technology and its limit; the other on the neutrality of technology. Of course, when we point out this trait of autonomy, we have to recall what we said about the determining factor. It is not a metaphysical and absolute autonomy, since technology is not subject to any determination, to any pressure whatsoever. Actually, there is always an interrelation. And Beaune is correct in saying that if technology is self-regulating, normalizing, etc., if technological progress is the chief cause of, say, the concentration of businesses, then the latter, conversely, are the privileged place of scientific and technological creation. All relationships are mutual, as between technology and the state. But before obeying the conditioning by an outside authority, technology pursues its development by virtue of its intrinsic imperatives. That is to say, external influence comes as an obstruction or as a direction, or as a deviation, or as assimilation and adaptation; but it is always secondary, coming after the intrinsic process unfolds. And because of its autonomy, technology upsets the traditional relationship between theory and practice. For technological society, there is a mistake in the Marxist analysis of the relationship between theory and practice; and this mistake is illuminated by B. Charbonneau: "How can we pass from theory to reality in a world in which, theory

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being the monopoly of science, practice becomes the monopoly of the state." Technology in itself does away with limits. Nothing is impossible or prohibited for it. This is not an accessory or accidental feature, it is the very essence of technology. A limit is never anything but what cannot at present be realized technologically—simply because beyond that limit, there is a possibility to be actualized. There is never any reason to halt at any point. There is never any boundary delimiting an authorized domain. Technology operates in this qualitative universe exactly as rocket ships do in space. We can go this far because our means do not yet allow us to reach Mars or Venus. What else could keep us back but the absence of means? But is this true in the human, social, and other sectors? The limits here are qualitatively different than for technology, which therefore cannot recognize or accept them as limits. Hence, there are two kinds of limits: those due to a lack of means and those that are qualitatively incommensurable (and therefore cannot be acknowledged as limits). Technology is thus not a transgressing phenomenon, but rather a phenomenon located in a potentially limitless universe because technology itself is potentially limitless. Technology presupposes a universe to its, technology's, own dimension, and therefore it cannot accept any previous limit. Everybody agrees that scientific research must be free and independent. The same holds for technology. So that our modern zealots, who advocate abolishing sexual morality, the family structure, social control, the hierarchy of values, etc., are nothing but spokesmen for technological autonomy in its absolute intolerance of any limits whatsoever. These zealots are perfectly conforming to the implicit technological orthodoxy. They believe they are fighting for their freedom; but this is really the freedom of technology, of which they are totally ignorant, and which they serve as blind slaves to the worst of all possible destinies. Our final comment is about the neutrality of technology. When we call technology autonomous, we are not implying that it is neutral—quite the contrary-but that it contains its own law and its own meaning. Technology is not an instrument that man can use as he likes. It has its own weight, which goes in technology's direction. Richta very judiciously emphasizes that all the theories on the “neutrality" of technology came after industrialization. This, he says, is because "in no earlier period did the productive forces take this form, which is indifferent to the commerce of individuals qua individuals" (Marx, The German Ideology).

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It is therefore interesting to stress that when I pointed out the nonneutrality of technology in 1950, I was attacked on two levels. First of all, in terms of the ideology that Richta shows and that sees man as still in charge of using that tool for good or evil. Marx's sentence clearly reveals the birthplace of this argument. But on the other hand, I was reproached by the Marxists for turning man away from the political struggle and depoliticizing him by centering everything on technology. This too is obeying the ideology of the neutrality of technology by believing that technology is not innocent only because it is in the wrong hands (which must be changed by political means). But this too is anti-Marxism. B. Charbonneau (Le chaos et le système) implacably demonstrates that technology tends to become its own end under cover of neutrality. "It is not neutral; it seems neutral only when it imposes itself automatically upon us. What we mistake for the neutrality of technology is merely our neutrality toward technology." Now, a reversal has taken place. Observers are admitting that technology is not neutral, but with a misreading when seen as the Marxists see it. For them, science and technology are not neutral because they express the relations of capitalist production. Science is an ideology (hence nonobjective), reflecting the ideas of the ruling class; technology is an instrument of domination by that class. I find all this fundamentally inaccurate. Science and technology remain identical in a socialist world (including China) with the same effects and structures, and only idealistic hocus—pocus convinces us that these signs have changed—comparable to the Christian faith in paradise. For me, the nonneutrality of technology signifies that technology is not an inert, weightless object that can be used in any manner, any direction by a sovereign mankind. Technology has in itself a certain number of consequences, it represents a certain structure, certain demands, and it brings certain modifications of man and society, which force themselves upon us whether we like it or not. Technology, of its own accord, goes in a certain direction. I am not saying that this is absolutely irremediable, but rather, that in order to change this structure or redirect this movement we have to make a tremendous effort to take over what was thought mobile and steerable, we have to become aware of this independence of the technological system, which is opposed by the reassuring conviction of technological neutrality.23 1

Jürgen Habermas, Technik und Wissenschaft als Ideologie (1968), criticizes this autonomy on the basis of Schelsky's work; but he has only a very sketchy and simple view of what technology's autonomy is really all about. 2 It is obvious-and this comment holds for all the rest of this discussion-that when I say technology "does not admit”, “wants," etc., I am not personifying in any way. I

am simply using an accepted rhetorical shortcut. In reality, it is the technicians on all levels who make these judgments and have this attitude; but they are so imbued, so impregnated with the technological ideology, so integrated into the system, that their vital judgments and attitudes are its direct expression. One can refer them to the system itself 3 I will not rehash my discussion of this issue. The reader may consult The Technological Society. What is presented here is supplementary. 4 "Neuf thèses sur la Science and la Technique" in Vivre et survivre (1975). This anonymous text is probably by Groetenduijk. I have summed up the first five theses. 5 Furia, Techniques et sociétés (1970), leans toward the same opinion. In contrast, see U. Matz; "Die Freiheit der Wissenschaft in der technischen Welt" in Politik und Wissenschaft (1971.). But he is actually investigating the freedom necessary for the scientist in a technicized state. 6 See Jacques Ellul, The Political Illusion (1967), and Finzi, Il potere tecnocratico (1977). 7 On the capacity of the state to play the role that is presumed, see Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, chap. 4, and The Political Illusion. I will not bother repeating these demonstrations here. 8 Conversely, and without taking up the problem again, we must nevertheless recall that the technological system, in which the state is necessarily integrated, gives the government a power such as no government has ever had. But, as I ought to point out, this power assumes an administrative face (see The Political Illusion). It is obvious that computers are integrating all social givens possible with an unimaginable potential of complete control of private life thanks to centralized processing of the totality of stored and utilized data. 9 Naturally, we are confronted with the difficulty caused by the ambiguity of the word political. It can refer either to everything concerning man as a social animal, or to the specific activity of the state and of the personnel of the government. Marcuse keeps switching back and forth between the two meanings when he declares that "the technological a priori is a political a priori to the extent that the transformation of nature involves that of man, to the extent that the creations made by man come from a social ensemble." From there, he allows himself to declare that, consequently, technology is subject to politics. Which is tautological, given that definition. But then he skids over to conclude that the governmental structures have to be modified. . . . 10 Bestoujev Lada, "Les Études sur l'avenir en U.R.S.S.," Analyse et prévision (1968). 11 See Vichney, "Le Japon: de la technique à la science," Le Monde, June 1972. 12 It appears, quite oddly, in one of the most profound and rigorous thinkers of our time, Bertrand de Jouvenel; he keeps insisting that it is man who decides, and that the overall decisions are made on a political leveltechnology being merely secondary and subsequent. And yet his admirable book L'Arcadie is the best demonstration of the autonomy, the self-sufficience, of technology. This notion runs all through his book, recurring constantly, so that we wonder if the author wrote "on several levels," which are complementary but different and at times seemingly opposed to one another. 13 Of course, everyone agrees that research is the key to (economic development and that it is therefore worth accumulating economic resources in order to achieve a greater economic advance by means of technological research. But the relation

between the two is growing less and less clear. "Research and development" is a source of very great uncertainties. In France, the O. E. C. D. (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) has concluded: "The relations of research and development to economic growth suffer from a paradox. They are both obvious and immeasurable. . . . Even excluding the money spent on military research, we are unable to bring out the correlation between the expenses of research and development and the growth of the G. N. P." And Closets has a good formula for defining the relationship between economy and technology: One can only speak of an "economy of uncertainty." As for research and development, see the series Analyse et prévision, 1967 to 1970–and the writings of Jouvenel. 14 Richta underlines an important turnabout in the Weberian school. At first, with Weber, they asserted that "one can rationalize technologically only in terms of commercial reason. . . . The law of technological reason must always yield to the law of economic reason." But since 1960, the Weber disciples (e.g., Papalakas) have been claiming that this economic rationality is relative and that the relationship between capital and technology is reversing: "It is economic reason that must adapt to the harsh technological reality, it is technological rationality that becomes the primary dimension and that thereby dominates the principal focus of tension in society" (R. Richta, Civilization at the Crossroads, p. 80). 15 Also see S. Rose, L'Idélogie de et dans la Science (1977), a work of strict Marxist orthodoxy, which tries to prove that science is ideological. Very scholarly and very disappointing. 16 Two very good examples of this autonomy are offered, though on different premises, by G. Vahanian and by H. Orlans. G. Vahanian, The Death of God, shows that the "how to do" has become independent of all Christian thought and has, in fact, invaded Christianity, which is subordinated to efficiency. H. Orlans, in Toward the Year 2000, Daedalus, 1967, shows that "not all technological development is desirable, of course, but we cannot really see how we can prevent anything technologically possible from being realized." 17 The reader can refer to the excellent analysis of such illusions in Seligman (A Most Notorious Victory, 1966), who shows that the tragedy of these illusions comes from technology's having its own strength, capable of destroying the designs of man, of determining his ideologies. And, as he shows at length, this autonomy of technology makes man's autonomy "at best questionable." 18 A. M. Weinberg, "Technologic on 'engineering' social," Analyse et prévision (1966). 19 Nevertheless, since 1968 we have to modify this statement slightly. Certain scientists (but no technicians as yet) are starting to ask moral questions about the legitimacy of their scientific work and its goals, however, with no results. 20 On the autonomy of technology from values, one should read the admirable pages by B. Charbonneau, Le Chaos et le systeme, particularly concerning the atomic bomb. "It is not the most monstrous tyrant that produces the bomb, but the most advanced society. And in 1944, it was not the U.S.S.R. or Nazi Germany, but an evangelical and liberal nation ruled by a president whose goal was to free the earth of fear. Who will have wanted the irreperable if ever it comes? Certainly not the scientists, who are only after knowledge, nor the technicians, who are only after power. As for the politicians, they are only after peace and justice. Unhappily, action commands. It was not Roosevelt who made the bomb: Hitler forced him, and then Stalin. But the Communists will demonstrate that the bomb is a product of capitalism. The proof is that the U.S.S.R. is exploding even more

powerful bombs. Who or what is behind the bomb? Progress (science, technology, the state) left to its own devices. The U.S.S.R. was the second nation to explode the bomb because it was the second power on the globe. Marx has no more to do with this than Jesus." 21 For lengthy treatments on the contents of this ethics, see Jacques Ellul, Le Vouloir et le faire, vol. 1, chap. 2 (1963). 22 In regard to man, Mumford shows decisively and at length how and why the series of the most advanced technological inventions has absolutely nothing to do with man's "central historical task, the task of becoming human." If we take the most recent technological exploits-the moon landing, climate control, artificial survival, creation of life-nothing has the least relationship to the project of "becoming human." Everything obeys the internal logic of the system. 23 There are certain studies that contest this autonomy; the most thorough study is by Bela Gold, "L'Entreprise et la genèse de l'innovation," in Analyse et prévision (1967). For Gold, technological strides are modeled on preexisting values and by the active convictions of men who decide to devote resources to research. But actually, despite his intention, Gold demonstrates that technological growth has, on the contrary, "brought a modification of principles serving as a guide for managerial decisions." In reality, the "choices" are completely involved in processes ruled by technological imperatives. And, as Gold quite correctly remarks, if progress per se is not made the essential objective of research, if innovation is not consciously desired, then nevertheless "the general opinion is that technological progress is inevitable and cannot be neglected." Gold's study does not strike me as demonstrating his viewpoint, but it does shed very useful light on the framework in which technological progress concretely unfolds. He shows that we obviously must not neglect the pressures acting for and against, the needs to be met, the difficulties of research, the obstacles to communication. In any case, he demonstrates that we are very far from being able to rationally choose and decide upon a policy of "guidance" for innovations and technological growth. There is not much to be gained from Bookchin's small study, Vers une technologic libératrice (1974), for he never seriously investigates the technological system and he keeps confounding the possibilities of technologies with their actual use. He shows that certain technologies would allow decentralizing, reducing small production units, humanizing, economizing on labor, etc. All of which is totally obvious, but accompanied by an implicit "if." If the world and if man were different from what they are then modern technology would be liberating. But never for an instant does Bookchin perceive that technology as a system has its own law of development, which contradicts the potentials of such and such a technology. Nor does he realize that man's approval of these technologies of power is not accidental, that it is not the capitalist system which makes technology alienating. Never for an instant does he envisage how actual technology could turn into liberating technology. The only relevant passage concerns the transformation into an anarchist society. But, alas, he instantly leaps into utopia.

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UNITY

THE technological system is, before anything else, a system, i.e., an ensemble whose parts are closely united with one another, interdependent, and obedient to a common regularity. This trait of unicity is simply the concrete expression of the system. The technologies are tied to one another in such a way that they exist only in terms of one another and are dependent in every way. We will not come back to this issue, which was studied in the preceding section. We will only examine the conditions and consequences of this unicity. This unicity, incidentally, is not a recent phenomenon; it has existed since the emergence of modern technology. Furia, in his excellent book, Techniques et société-liaisons et évolutions (1970) shows that all technologies have been tied to one another since the start of the Industrial Revolution. For instance, textile machines and steam engines, in order to run smoothly, durably, and without slack, required precision-made metallic parts—hence the importance of manufacturing and improving tool machines. But I am not so convinced that the machine-made product was any more precise than the craftsman's handmade product, despite Daumas's certainty and the examples he offers in Histoire des techniques, III According to Daumas, all the innovations transforming industry between 1760 and 1830 were linked to the development of industrial machinery. Thus, the invention of Wilkinson's boring machine was indispensable for obtaining a satisfactory tightness between the piston and the cylinder in Watt's condensing engine. No doubt, as artisan would have done just as good a job; but his work would itself have demanded the acquisition of a new technology! "Technological progress constitutes a whole of which the different elements are interlinked by tensions making them dependent

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on one another" (Daumas, Histoire des techniques, III). As a consequence, each discovery can be applied in a huge number of areas; each engine or machine has become polyvalent. We know, for instance, that the computer can be applied to anything—administration, education, medicine, practical life, time allotment, etc. See the detailed study in Seligman, The Programming of Minerva. However, the same holds true for the Laser beam2 and, in a totally different area, for the inflatable structures, which can be used not only as housing, but also in agriculture, transportation, telecommunications, etc.3 This is becoming a deliberate objective. More and more polyvalent technologies are being sought (e.g., for the new NASA program). But the consequence is a fundamental unity of the entire technological field: the ramification of these applications tends to modify the ensemble of activities according to a single model. *** We very easily note the identity of traits in the technological phenomenon wherever it emerges. Whether technological growth occurs in England or Japan, in the United States or the Soviet Union, it has the same causes and the same effects, it gives man the same framework of living, imposes a form of labor upon him, brings the same modifications to the social and political organisms, demands the same conditions for its growth and development. And it does this regardless of the historical origins, the geographic locations or possibilities, the social or political regimes. Of course, there are nuances, distinctions, but they are very largely secondary. The demands of those immersed in the technological system may vary slightly, according to local customs; but all those demands are essentially identical. In reality, we are dealing everywhere with common traits of the technological phenomenon. And they are so sharp that we can very easily discern what is part of the technological phenomenon and what is not. The difficulties one may encounter when studying technology are due to one's method, vocabulary, the complexity of the facts, but in no wise to the phenomenon per se, which is eminently simple to take note of. We see more and more clearly that just as there are factors common to things as different as a rocket ship and a TV set, so too there are identical characteristics in the organization of an office and the methods for building an airplane. An extraordinary diversity of appearances exists in the proliferation of work, objects, machines, methods; but

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behind this diversity, we perceive a fairly similar texture everywhere and an immense system of uninterrupted correlations. Many authors have spoken of "technological fallout": When working on an enormous, gigantic project, like the atomic bomb or the conquest of space, we are led by these accomplishments to create work methods, products, technological entities, some of which will then be employed in a very general and standard way in objects or forms concerning everyone. We all know that spaceship research brought an improvement in the technologies of metals, electronics, information, ballistics, and "miniaturization.” The achievement of integrated circuits caused vast changes in so many industrial products, e.g., the huge improvement in radio and TV, leading to what is known as the "fourth epoch" of computers. Furthermore, this research has greatly advanced the technology of the "reliability" of materials, which implies remarkable changes in aviation, etc. The notion of "fallout" was keenly challenged by Closets (chap. 5), and in part correctly. He claims that the fallout concept was spread by the military services and NASA to justify the enormous research budgets in those areas, and to explain that the technological discoveries in this context ultimately serve in many other areas, assuring an overall technological progress. Closets's affirmation is probably accurate. But that we are dealing with an "undemonstrated postulate"-i.e., building a rocket ship allows us to automatically discover some new technology-strikes me as less certain. Closets refuses to see the polyvalence in technological products and processes. Obviously, the finished products for the construction of a spaceship cannot be immediately placed on the market or put to general use. However, the foundations for manufacturing these products can indeed be put to general use, so long as a transfer is made. In all likelihood, the most important examples of fallout are indirect, as Closets himself points out. "They bear upon the methods of organizations, the way to use new technologies," and he offers the well-known example of P. E. R. T. (Program Evaluation and Review Technique). Established for building Polaris missiles, this method was applied as an organizational model for complex operations in the most diverse areas. Now this certainly consists of (organizational) technologies and reveals better than anything else the unicity of the ensemble. But for advances to be made in this way and for "fallout" to happen, we need a wide dissemination. In this area, we have to

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recognize the openness of information in the United States. Americans are the only people who truly understand the "technological system" and its rules. Thus, they very quickly publish their technological inventions, knowing that others will do so more or less as quickly, and that this is the condition for the rapidity of technological growth. Conversely, e.g., in France, some of the reasons for technological blockage are the dispersion of the research teams, the lack of coordination between programs, and the mutual secrecy of the laboratories. Technologies all have a reciprocal action upon one another, they interpenetrate, associate, condition one another. If it had not been for rapid transports, neither urbanization, nor industrial growth, nor mass consumption would have been possible.4 Each of these sectors causes, demands the emergence of dozens of new technologies in all sectors-materials, organization, psychology-which have repercussions on the use and growth of transportations, which in turn brings new technological research in this domain.5 Technologies do not have a parallel development, they do not array themselves in a "dispersed order" in a different and alien environment. The truth of the matter is that the possibility of achieving each technology demands a certain number of other achieved technologies (sometimes very far away and, at first glimpse, unrelated). And, vice versa, the progress of each technology causes or requires, for its realization, a progress of diverse or multiple technologies. Nowadays, technicians are so well aware of this that they often try to link apparently unrelated technologies in order to see what the outcome might be. Bringing together mechanical, electromagnetic, biological, psychological technologies, etc., has become quite normal.6 For many of the best sociologists of technology, it is not the invention that is of primary importance, but rather the ability to join multiple technologies. The prototype of an invention is nearly always defective. America's lead is analyzed as due to her ability to produce series of models that are vastly improved when their structures incorporate elements from other technologies, and that are therefore capable of far greater performance and efficiency (Freeman). In other words, the big problem of technological advance is technological correlations and information. These correlations, moreover, lead to imposing the technological weight where it has not seemed necessary. With society becoming technicized, education must also adjust. Universities have to be more technological in order to furnish men better qualified to use

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technologies in society. France's National School of Administration must abandon its trend toward humanist education. Its students must be trained to use all the new technologies, on all levels, inside and outside of administration. Such is the goal of the 1969 reforms at the National School of Administration. But conversely, the men thus trained are obviously going to speed up the application of technologies and reinforce the use of multiple means of this type. Everything functions by way of reciprocal effects. Thus, for examination and comprehension, it has become impossible to investigate a technology per se, its progress, methods, effects. For the true problem, and I will even say the true reality of our society, is the system of relations among the various technologies and the mutual repercussions among them, with ramifications so complex that observers wind up with generalized consequences. Hence, the proper object of study is the system of relations between the technologies. Now this is a sociological object, because the synthesis between the countless diverse technologies has altered social bodies and human life. We are here reaching a certainty about the unicity of technology and the existence of a system. Everyone is talking about these changes. People know that the family, the factories, the offices, the associations, have been going through enormous changes for the past century: leisure, travel, the rhythm of work, the standard of living, etc. It is not worth listing the hundreds of examples that are demonstrated everywhere. And people even expect the changes. When they encounter a technological enterprise that does not seem to have great practical consequences for society or for the individual, they promptly ask: "What good is it" Hence, when someone wonders about the "conquest of space": “What use will it serve?" his is not a wretched spirit of utilitarianism. Rather, he is expressing the obvious fact that technology modifies all forms of life. It has created new kinds of behavior, beliefs, ideologies, political movements. It determines the factors of life, the levels and modes of existence. Anyone, no matter who knows as much and says as much. Do people imagine that these effects are due to, on the one hand, airplanes and, on the other hand, TV sets, plus organizational methods, or, even further, psychological manipulations? If all aspects of human and social life have changed fundamentally, it is because the environment in which man now finds himself, his system of references, and all his modes of action, have changed fundamentally and thoroughly.7

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But this is not caused by the appearance of a certain apparatus or a certain method. There must, on the contrary, be a new environment, a new reference system, a new overall complex of modes of action. And that is what the technological system is. Recognizing, discerning the generality of the effects of technology forces us to go back to the generality of the system. It is this system that now fashions the framework of unity in our society. Technology is no longer, as in the past, one factor among others in a society which produces a civilization and is the milieu in which a technology could be situated. It has, on the contrary, become not only the determining fact but also the "enveloping element," inside which our society develops. We should really be aware of the relation that likewise exists between what seems to be technological to us and what seems to be something else. Even the most independent, the most nontechnological activities are located—whether we like it or not—in the technological system. Just as in the Middle Ages, for example, everything was located in the Christian system (even when having no direct or visible relationship).8 On the one side, everything is interpreted, understood, and received in terms of technology. On the other side, everything is ultimately modified by the sheer presence of the technologies: if we take the "crisis of the Churches," aggiornamento, the spiritual and liturgical changes, etc. This occurs not because of a direct influence by some technology or other, but because religious and ecclesiastical life is now situated within a technological world. The extreme point here is the systematic quest for the theological transformations and the effort to apply technologies directly: for instance, data processing, linguistics, group dynamics, etc. Needless to say, these temptations are explained not by the inventive genius of their originators, but by their being so deeply immersed in the technological system that they fail to see how any nontechnological activity could still be conceivable. Finally, we have to remember that this unicity operates in time. Technological undertakings are long-term ventures. Technology does not evolve by leaps and variations: it perpetuates itself. Once a technological course is taken, it requires so much capital, human energy, so many organizations, other technologies, so much planning, that it is materially impossible to either stop, choose a different route, or go back. As we shall see, the effects are cumulative and the directions imperative. The equipments influencing our

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lives or the quality of our surroundings have long-term or very long-term effects. We feel the consequences of decisions that were made long ago and that we have no power to direct. I tried to show this at length in The Political Illusion; Kolm demonstrates it in political economy. This unicity of the system makes it rigid and coherent—concretely (not ideologically, for one can always imagine any utopia of malleability of technologies). In now adopting a technological direction, we would have to foresee these "commitments," and calculate the welfare of generations to come. Yet none of this ever goes into our planning! *** The phenomenon of the unicity of technology appears both positively and negatively with computers in particular. Roughly, one may say that computers have an unimaginable power but are unemployed. They are blocked everywhere by the lack of progress in other technologies. Furia (Techniques et société-liaisons et evolutions, 1970) notes, for instance, that there is a third generation of computers but no third generation of applications. Because of these deficiencies, more than half of all computers are unprofitable. They are used with programs thought up by the previous generations. For lack of intellectual technologies, programmers transpose the applications studied for obsolete calculators. Software seems to lag increasingly behind hardware. Man thus is obliged to seek technological adaptions and invent apparatuses in which functions hitherto performed by programs (but no longer performable by man) will be integrated into the very logic, the very structure of the computer. A portion of software, too costly and hard to produce, must be replaced by an improvement in the computer. If an instrument like the computer is to have its place, it must enter a highly advanced technological environment; for the computer connects all the parts of the system, while demanding from all technologies an "advance," which brings them to light in terms of this newcomer. Thus, the computer is often blocked by a breakdown in the communication instruments (Elgozy). There can be a perfect data-processing service, which other types of communication render inoperative. If the computer does not give all it can, this may be due to slowness in the telephone and telex. "Deprived of such instruments, data processing for its own sake is uninteresting.” But this factor, presented as a demand, is far from immediate realization; it will require new technological changes.

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However, we have witnessed this phenomenon in regard to peripherals.” For years, the possibilities of the computer were blocked by the peripherals-devised essentially to handle the paper (punched cards, listing cards, then by the tape units. But all these things (even the magnetic disks organized into detachable groups, dispacks) are still very inferior to the computer itself. In 1972, it was held that we had been with the third generation of computers for years (integrated electronic circuits instead of the transistors and electronic tubes of foregoing generations) and were about to enter the fourth generation. But as far as peripherals were concerned, we had not even come to the second generation. Data acquisition is as backward as data emission. The acquisition still takes place on paper; in France, the figure is 57%. But this is not just a matter of technological innovation. Like for TV several years ago, it is also a question of standardizing (a further imperative of technological unicity). There is still no standardizing of the “computer/peripheral" interfaces, for there has to be adjustment to the standards of each computer manufacturer. Now this lack clearly holds up any potential strides in peripherals, which can advance only if standardized. But then computers must be standardized first. This, in turn, entails, more or less rapidly, a new concentration—as explained by R. Lattès ("Les Sociétés informatiques de 1980," Le Monde, March 1971). The advances made by data processing require a "unity of control" for the creation of machines—as well as a tele-data-processing without limits: hence, new essential technological challenges to economic or political structures. The unicity of technologies tends to be so tight that no major innovation can be introduced at any point of the system without promptly causing hitches and demands for technological progress in all the other factors. *** The unicity of the technological system has a huge number of consequences. A first consequence, which we shall not dwell on is the necessity of a technological order once removed: namely, the multiplication of technological authorities to organize the unicity of the system, just as a scientific organization of scientific progress is necessary. The above is well known. Let us also recall that the unicity of the system entails the necessary correlation among the technologies. This correlation seems so decisive that some people envisage

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creating certain "new organisms,“ even in a liberal economy. Their task would be to acquire sufficient competence in diverse technological areas. They would also have something like a diplomatic mission between businesses in order to aid efficiently in passing specialized knowledge all around. Strange to tell, we are thus ultimately renouncing competitiveness for the sake of necessary technological cooperation, which dominates everything.9 Of a different sort are the following consequences of this unicity: the impossibility of distinguishing between good and bad technologies; the relation between forms and contents of technologies; the identity of technology and its use; the polyvalence of each technology; the independence of the technological system from political or social regimes; the impossibility of confining a technology to limited use and preventing it from passing into public use, etc. These are the consequences that I studied in detail and with numerous examples in The Technological Society. We need not go into all this here. Let us merely recall that the unicity of the system, which permits both its rapid progression and its equilibrium, may be the cause of its fragility in certain cases: when one point is hit, everything risks being paralyzed. The technological system, in which all the technologies are related and coordinated, should be compared to the electric network on which ultimately everything depends. A broken line has far-reaching human and economic consequences because of the technological solidarity of the entire network: an interruption in the mass transit of workers, work stoppage in the factories involved, a delay in the arrival of raw materials, a loss of working time, with repercussions—e.g., in Paris, for the 260,000 suburban workers arriving at Gare du Nord, or the 300,000 at Gare Saint-Lazare. The collectivity has to pay dearly for the tiniest snag. The more unity in the system, the more fragile it becomes. Let us now look at another set of consequences. To the extent that the phenomenon has this unicity, when one seeks a response to a damaging effect, a solution to difficulties caused by technology, a way of coping with some problem, one should not envisage a separate technological phenomenon isolated from its context. One must look at the whole system, because it is generally on the basis of an overall view that one can understand the why and wherefore of a factor which might otherwise seem absurd, and that one can measure the complexity of the questions raised. Usually, one focuses on one single element, which seemingly allows finding a satisfactory answer, yet one irritatedly wonders why that answer is

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not applied. One then seeks mythical reasons—influences by a political regime, an economic structure, an alogical ideology. However, the proposed solution is inapplicable quite simply because of the overall technological context in which it is meant to be integrated. Let us cite a few examples. Technologically, it is now easy to supply the public with information that is correct, "objective," general, immediate. Even the knotty problem of honesty, noninterference by political or economic interests, can be resolved technologically. Hence, everything can run smoothly. But in reality, nothing can run smoothly, because we fail to deal with the actual situation in the technological milieu of the receiver and user of the information: the informed man. The life-style created for him by the technological surroundings prevents him from being correctly informed, he lacks the intellectual background, the time and the direction. And this lack is not due to any human flaw; the technological condition is at the bottom of it. This problem of "good information," incidentally, is now worked out on the level of technological information, the only kind that can actually be processed. For we must distinguish between technological information (which concerns "data") and the general information of the average citizen. The former kind is as encroaching, as overwhelming, but it was believed (and uninformed people still believe) that it could be mastered with the computer, that all such information would only need to be stuffed into the computer, and data processing would do everything. Yet it is quite obvious that "general" information must be acquired and known by each citizen. Otherwise it cannot help him to form his opinion. However, for technological information, too, we have come to realize that direct human knowledge is indispensable.10 "Distributing and utilizing this information poses a problem that becomes all the more noticeable as the organizations grow and the lines of their structures get entangled. The decisions about the system of circulating technological information have a manifold effect under these conditions. Managers, executives, organizers, are equally involved by the disposition of this system." But then we have an interesting example of the unicity of technologies. For passing on and correctly using information, we need a psycho-sociological type of intervention in order to qualify a group or individuals to receive and use the information. There must then be cooperation between the study-and-development sector, data processing, psychology, etc., in order to obtain the positive

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results from the ensemble of information technologies. We thus have blockages stemming from certain technologies, "contrary effects," as well as a greater and greater need for cooperativeness. One can likewise find the best pedagogical technology, assuring a training for the individual plus a development of knowledge: technologically, that is already known. But this research ignores both the growth of the population, the increase of the "intermediary age" (young adults, whose intellectual training keeps getting longer, holding them away from practical life), and the professional equilibrium in a given social body. All these problems are also rooted in technology. From an agricultural standpoint, it has been said over and over again that the optimum in France would be to reduce the farming population to fifteen percent of the total population. This evidence of economic technology is made possible by mechanizations and chemical products. But we run into very knotty issues of urban growth and further rural exodus, into psychological conflicts of adjusting to a new milieu, into economic difficulties of employment, etc. All these things depend on the influence of the technological environment on uprooted people or of technological possibilities in sectors adjacent to the rural sector. We could multiply the examples. They all show that one cannot hope to solve an isolated problem in our society, for our society is an ensemble, whose structure is the technological system. The responses must be all-inclusive, like the society itself. Otherwise, we end up in either of the following two situations. Everyone wants to give the response suitable to the specialization in his area. But if the solution is well adapted to the problem he is familiar with, then that solution is out of "synch" with the rest of the society, sometimes inapplicable, and in any event inadequate because each technological situation depends on the ensemble of the struct